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THE ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON - CHICAGO 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



THE ANCIENT 
GREEK HISTORIANS 

(HARVARD LECTURES) 



BY 

J. B. BURY, LiTT.D., LL.D. 

KEGIUS PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1909 

All rights reserved 



3e 



LIBRARY of CONGREsi] 
Two Copies Received 

JAN 18 1909 

Copyrife-iit tntry i 
-ASS a- XXc, No, 
COPY 3. ' 



COPTEIGHT, 1909, 

By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1909. 



Nortooob i^rese : 
Berwick & Smith Co., Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



\V*^^ 



..A 



TAPAINEP MAPTINni AAIN 

*IAEAAHNI *IAEAAHN 



PREFACE 

This volume consists of the Lane Lectures which 
I had the honour of delivering at Harvard Uni- 
versity in spring 1908, under the auspices of the 
Classical Department. They are printed very 
nearly as they were originally written, though 
some of my kind hearers, if they should glance 
through, may detect a good many passages which 
were omitted in the Lecture Hall. The book 
amounts to a historical survey of Greek historio- 
graphy, down to the first century B.C., and such 
as it is, I dedicate it to Mr. Gardiner M. Lane, 
who founded the lecturership some years ago in the 
interests of humanistic study. 

The lecture on Herodotus would have gained 
much if Mr. Macau's admirable work on the last 
three Books had appeared in time for me to use it. 
It was satisfactory to find that he had established 
the priority of those Books with a convincing array 
of arguments. I have inconsistently included his 
edition of vii.-ix. in the Bibliography; for the 
purpose of the list is to make a general acknow- 
ledgment of obligations which in lectures of this 
kind could not conveniently be acknowledged in 



viii ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS 

detail. There are not very many questions con- 
nected with the Greek historians which I have not 
at one time or another talked over with my friend 
Mr. Mahaify, and I feel sure that I owe him much 
which neither of us could now verify. 



September 5, 1908. 



CONTENTS 

LW5T. FAOB 

I. The Rise of Greek History in Ionia ... 1 

§ 1. The Historical Aspect of the Epics . . 2 

§ 2. The Foundation of History by Hecataeus . 8 
The Successors of Hecataeus : § 3. Early Mytho- 

graphers 18 

§ 4. Early Historians 21 

§ 5. Summary 33 

II. Herodotus 36 

III. Thucydides 75 

§ 1. His Life and the Growth of his Work. . 75 
§ 2. His Principles of Historiography : accuracy 

and relevance . . . . . .81 

§ 3. Modern Criticisms on his Competence . . 91 

§ 4. His Treatment of non-contemporary History 102 

IV. Thucydides (continued) . . . . . .107 

§ 1. The Speeches 107 

§■2. Dramatic Treatment of the Azjfonae ^er.soraae ll6 
§ 3. Rationalistic View of History . . .123 

§ 4. Political Analysis 131 

V. The Development of Greek Historiography after 

Thucydides . . . . . .150 

§ 1. The Generation after Thucydides (Xeno- 

phon, Cratippus, Philistus) . . .150 
§ 2. The Influence of Rhetoric . . . . l60 

§ 3. The Influence of Philosophy and the Rise of 

Antiquarianism . . . . .179 
ix 



X ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS 

LECT. PAGE 

VI. PoLYBius (and Poseidonius) ..... 191 
VII. The Influence of Greek on Roman Historio- 
graphy ........ 224 

VIII. Views of the Ancients concerning the Use of 

History ........ 242 

Appendix. The Re-handling of his History by Thucydides 26 1 

Bibliography ......... 267 

Index 273 



THE ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS 



LECTURE I 

THE RISE OF GllEEK HISTORY IN IONIA 

In these lectures I propose to trace the genesis 
and the development of the historical literature 
of the Greeks. I will attempt to bring into a 
connected view the principles, the governing ideas, 
and the methods of the Greek historians, and to 
relate them to the general movements of Greek 
thought and Greek history. I need hardly 
apologize for devoting much of our time to 
Herodotus and Thucydides, who, however familiar 
to us from childhood, have the secret of engaging 
an interest that is never exhausted and never 
grows stale. As a Hellenist, I shall be happy if 
I succeed in illustrating the fact that, as in poetry 
and letters generally, as in art, as in philosophy, 
and in mathematics, so too in history, our debt to 
the Greeks transcends calculation. They were 
not the first to chronicle human events, but they 
were the first to apply criticism. And that means, 
they originated history. 

m I B 



ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 



§ 1. The historical aspect of the Epics 

Long before history, in the proper sense of 
the word, came to be written, the early Greeks 
possessed a literature which was equivalent to 
history for them and was accepted with unreserved 
credence — their epic poems. The Homeric lays 
not only entertained the imagination, but also 
satisfied what we may call the historical interest, 
of the audiences who heard them recited. This 
interest in history was practical, not antiquarian ; 
the story of the past made a direct appeal to their 
pride, while it was associated with their religious 
piety towards their ancestors. Every self-re- 
specting city sought to connect itself, through its 
ancient clans, with the Homeric heroes, and this 
constituted the highest title to prestige in the 
Greek world. The poems which could confer 
such a title were looked up to as authoritative 
historical documents. In disputes about territory 
the Iliad was appealed to as a valid witness. The 
enormous authority of Homer, the deep hold 
which the Trojan epics had won on the minds 
and hearts of the Greeks, may partly explain the 
puzzle, why it was so long before it occurred to 
them to record recent or contemporary events. 
For when we consider the early growth of their 
political intelligence, the paucity of their historical 
records must strike us with surprise. In the 
seventh century they were far advanced in political 



I THE EPICS AS HISTORY 3 

experience. Sparta, for instance, had a compli- 
cated constitution ; yearly magistrates had been 
introduced at Athens. The number of the small 
independent states which had to live together, 
some of which had special relations to one another, 
tended to develop the political sense. Intensity 
of political life had been the outcome of the 
institution of the polls, and the Hellenic world 
was the scene of numerous and various experi- 
ments in government. In these conditions, 
political literature originated. Archilochus, Tyr- 
taeus, Solon, and Theognis were the most eminent 
of the ancient publicists who dealt with current 
politics in metrical pamphlets. But the Greeks 
of this period felt no impulse to record their 
experiences in historical records ; the only history 
they cared for was still furnished by the epics. 
Long before this, Egypt and Assyria had 
abundant contemporary records, narratives of 
conquests and achievements, inscribed for the 
glorification of some powerful monarch. But the 
early Greeks, even despots, were free from the 
kind of self- consciousness which prompted an 
Assur-bani-pal to draw up a narrative of his 
deeds ; Periander and Peisistratus did not think 
of securing posthumous fame by such appeals to 
posterity. Had Peisistratus been an oriental ruler, 
he would have invited his literary friends to 
celebrate his own career ; being a Greek of his 
time, he appointed a committee of men of letters 
to edit the Homeric poems. There were indeed 



4 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

some records kept in the seventh century, and 
perhaps sooner, which at a later time were to 
prove useful; but they were bare enumerations 
of names, such as lists of magistrates or priests. 

Now it is important to realise that the historical 
interest of the Greeks of those days, concentrated 
as it was on the epic traditions, was active and 
productive. The epics were still growing in the 
seventh century, though the period of growth was 
soon to be over. It is almost certain that the 
Iliad and Odyssey did not reach the fulness of 
their present compass much before 600 b.c. I 
need only ask you to recall the lectures which 
Mr. Gilbert Murray delivered at this University 
last year ; some things he said happen to 
prepare the way for the consideration of the 
origins of historiography. He insisted, rightly as 
I think, on the fact that the groundwork and 
principal motives of the Homeric epics were 
historical ; and he showed, with admirable insight, 
how the development of the poems, in its succes- 
sive stages, responded to, and reflected, the ideas, 
manners, and tastes of successive periods. But 
besides this moral and social criticism which Mr. 
Murray traced, there was another kind of criticism 
which betrayed the spirit of historical inquiry. 
The epics relating to the Trojan war, which 
existed, let us say, about 800 B.C. in order to fix 
our ideas, would raise in an inquiring mind many 
questions as to the course of the war, its final 
conclusion, the fortunes of many heroes who took 



I THE EPICS AS HISTORY 5 

part in it, — questions to which Homer gave no 
answer. To quench the thirst for such informa- 
tion was the office of later poets, who related 
events which the older bards did not know or 
assumed as known. They had to fill up interstices 
and to explain inconsistencies, and this process 
necessarily entailed a definite consideration of 
chronological sequence, an element which the 
original creators of myth do not take into serious 
account. It is impossible to say how far these 
later poets of the Homeric school drew upon 
local legends, how far upon their own invention, 
but in their hands the traditions of the Trojan 
expedition and its heroes were wrought into a 
corpus of Trojan epics, chronologically connected, 
in which the Iliad and the Odyssey had their 
places. 

The new instinct for systematizing tradition 
gave rise at the same time to the school of 
genealogical poets, of which Hesiod was the most 
distinguished and perhaps the first. Their aim 
was to work into a consistent system the relation- 
ships of the gods and heroes, deriving them from 
the primeval beings who generated the world, 
and tracing thereby to the origin of things the 
pedigrees of the royal families which ruled in 
the states of Hellas.^ The interest in genealogies 

^ Hesiod's Theogony contains a first crude idea of a history of civilisa- 
tion in the legend of the Five Ages of man, which evidently brings up to 
date an older version in which the ages were Four. The fanciful notion 
of marking the degeneration of the race by four ages named after four 
metals is improved upon by interpolating the age of Homeric heroes 
before the last or iron age. 



6 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

linking actual families with legendary heroes ^ was 
closely allied to the interest in " origins " connect- 
ing the foundations of cities with the heroic age. 
This interest gave rise to a group of what we 
may call local epics, approximating in style and 
character to the Hesiodic school, recording the 
mythical origins (/cTto-et?) and the pedigrees of 
the founders. We know, for instance, of the 
Corinthiaca, ascribed to Eumelus, which may 
have been the source of certain later sections of 
the Iliad ; ^ of the Naupactian poem ; of the 
Phoronis which took its name from Phoroneus, 
reputed the first King of Argos. 

In all this intellectual activity, we can recognise 
in a crude form the instinct of historical inquiry, 
guided by the ideas of consistency and chrono- 
logical order. The genealogies inevitably brought 
chronology into the foreground. We can also 
see that the poets possessed a certain kind of 
historical sense. They were conscious up to a 
certain point of the differences between their own 
civilisation and that of the heroic age, and this 
consciousness expressed itself in the archaism 
which we can observe in the Iliad and Odyssey. 
The poets always retained, for instance, the 
obsolete bronze armour of antiquity. 

One epic poem, belonging to the seventh or 
perhaps the sixth century, claims a special mention 

^ In this connexion Mahaffy notes an " anxiety to show hereditary 
rights in all the usurpers of power throughout early Greek history" 
{Prose Writers, i. 10), 

2 Cp. Murray, Rise of the Greek Epic, p. 162. 



I THE EPICS AS HISTORY 7 

here, the Arimaspea ascribed to Aristeas of Pro- 
connesus. The subject of this work was Scythia, 
which the author seems to have visited, and its 
importance for our present purpose is that it 
anticipated the interest in geography and ethno- 
graphy which, as we shall see, accompanied the rise 
of history proper. It seems too to have contained 
a reference to an event of what for Aristeas was 
modern history, the movement of the Cimmerians 
in the seventh century, a movement which he very 
properly explained by the pressure of neighbouring 
peoples/ The Arimaspea however is not altogether 
isolated. A geographical interest is distinctly 
present in the Odyssey ; M. Berard has illustrated 
its significance and the historical background. 
But perhaps it is rather in the ancient Argonautic 
poems, ranging into the same regions which 
Aristeas visited, that we may seek the inspiration 
of the Arimaspea. 

Up to the middle or end of the sixth century, 
then, their epic poetry satisfied the historical 
interest of the Greeks. For us it is mythical, for 
them it was historical. And further, during the 
later centuries of the epic period, it was becoming 
quasi-historical in form. The body of traditions 
was being submitted to crude and rudimentary 
processes of what we may call historical inquiry. 

^ The main authority for Aristeas is Herodotus iv. 13-16 (cp. Macau's 
notes). The date here (15) assigned, " 240 years ago," is obviously that 
of the foundation of Cyzicus (c. 680 b.c.) and may be used to fix the com- 
position of Book IV. to c. 440 b.c. For the guess that Aristeas lived in the 
sixth century, it may be said that Dionysius, Be Thuc. 23, brackets him 
with Cadmus ; but this is hardly enough to estabhsh even a presumption. 



8 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect 

The later poets of the Homeric school, and the 
poets of the Hesiodic school, worked in obedience 
to the need of systematic arrangement and chrono- 
logical order. There was no absolute chronology, 
no dates ; but time-sequence determined the com- 
pletion of the Trojan cycle, and the relation of the 
Trojan to other cycles (such as the Theban), and, 
in the very nature of the subject, it controlled the 
genealogical poems. Scattered and contradictory 
traditions were harmonized more or less into a 
superficially consistent picture of the past by the 
activity of these poets. Their work must have 
counted for a great deal in both satisfying and 
stimulating the self-consciousness of the Greeks. 

§ 2. The foundation of history by Hecataeus 

It might be expected that such an examination 
of the ancient literature and traditions, though 
carried out with no under-thought of questioning 
their truth as a whole, would have sown the germs 
of criticism and prepared the way for incredulity. 
This is a difficult question, as our knowledge of 
this literature is so fragmentary. We can point 
at least to the notorious scepticism of Stesichorus 
about the story of Helen. But we can do more. 
The truth seems to be that towards the end of the 
epic period there arose in Ionia a spirit which it 
would be going too far to describe as incredulous, 
but which was certainly ffippant and sceptical and 
might at any moment break out into positive 



I RISE OF CRITICISM 9 

incredulity. This spirit is revealed, as Mr. Murray 
has well shown, in some late parts of the Iliad, 
especially in the episode of the Beguiling of Zeus ; 
it appears in the Odyssey in the lay of Demodocus, 
which tells of the punishment of Ares and 
Aphrodite by the injured husband Hephaestus. 

Such tendencies to scepticism, evolved by the 
Ionian temper, were reinforced by the rise of 
Ionian science and philosophy. Science and 
philosophy meant criticism, and it would not be 
long before criticism which the early thinkers 
applied to the material world would be systemati- 
cally applied to human tradition also, and the 
result would be, in some form or other, the 
distinction of history from myth. 

At the same time the mythopoeic instinct of 
the Greeks was still potent and still felicitous in 
its operation. But myth assumed a new shape. 
Supernatural beings no longer appeared upon the 
stage ; and, with the exception of oracles, omens, 
and visions, the supernatural mise en scene was 
discarded. Fictions gathered round historical 
persons, contemporary or recent, but all these 
stories, such as the saving of Cypselus, the wooers 
of Agarista, the ring of Polycrates, kept well 
within the fence of the possibilities of human 
experience. They are not in the crude sense 
incredible, aincrTa rS KaO' r)fia<; ^i(p. This new order 
of myths corresponds to a new interest, which we 
might call the philosophy of life ; it is reflected in 
the gnomic poetry of the period. Sages have 



10 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

taken the place of heroes ; the Septemvirate of 
Wise Men was one of the mythical creations. 
The authority of Delphi is established beside the 
authority of Homer, and Delphi seems to have 
been a centre for fiction of this order. 

Now let us suppose that before the end of the 
sixth century a thoughtful man began to reflect 
upon the past fortunes of the Greeks. He would 
be struck by the fact that the character of their 
history had completely changed. The age of the 
heroes, as described in the epics, was marked by 
divine interventions, frequent intercourse between 
gods and men, startling metamorphoses, and all 
kinds of miracles. How was it that the character 
of human experience had changed and that such 
marvels had ceased to happen ? It was inevitable 
that the question should be asked : can we believe 
the epic poets and take all they tell us for literal 
fact ? And we find that before 500 b.c. a philo- 
sopher of Ionia, Xenophanes, had arraigned the 
credibility of Homer and Hesiod.^ He rejected 
the anthropomorphisms of popular theology, and 
branded the Greek myths as ancient fictions (7r\a- 
(Tfiara rcbv irporepcov). His rationalism was in the 
interest of cosmic law. He was applying, whether 
explicitly or not, the principle formulated by later 

^ It is believed that much about the same time a western Greek, 
Theagenes of Rhegium, was attempting to interpret Homer allegorically. 
According to Tatian, adv. Graecos 31, he flourished in the time of 
Cambyses ; schol. Ven. to H. T 67 (533 ed. Bekker) he was the first to 
write on Homer, and he introduced allegorical interpretation ; the schol. 
on Dionysius Thrax (Bekker, Anecd. Or, 729) suggests that he dealt with 
grammar. 



I HECATAEUS 11 

rationalists that what was possible once is possible 
still, and what is incredible now is incredible 
always. And he was also concerned, in the cause 
of ethics, to denounce the attribution to the gods 
of conduct condemned by the contemporary moral 
standards of Greece.^ 

Besides the efforts of Ionian men of science to 
explain nature by reason, — besides the dawn of 
philosophy, — there was another fact which con- 
tributed, in the second part of the sixth century, to 
widen the horizon of intelligent minds in Ionia. 
The power of Persia had been extended to the 
Aegean, and the Asiatic Greeks had been incor- 
porated in the Persian empire. A natural conse- 
quence was the stimulation of interest and curiosity 
among those Greeks about the other lands of the 
great realm to which they were now attached ; and 
their new position provided facilities for gratifying 
this curiosity. Oriental geography and history 
presented to the Greeks a new field of study, and 
this exercised, as we shall see, an important influ- 
ence in bringing history to the birth. 

Its birth is associated with the name of Hecataeus 
of Miletus. He was, first and foremost, a geo- 
grapher. I do not dispute the title of Anaxi- 
mander to be called the "father of geography," 
but Hecataeus may be considered one of the 



^ It is remarkable that Xenophanes wrote two epic poems on quasi- 
historical subjects — the Origin of his native home Colophon, and the 
colonisation of his adoptive home Elea ; but no traces of these works 
have survived. It would be interesting to know how he handled definite 
traditions. 



12 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

founders of geographical science ; his chief con- 
tributions to knowledge were in that field. Born 
perhaps near the middle of the sixth century, he 
not only travelled in Greek lands and on the 
shores of the Black Sea, but explored the interior 
parts of the Persian empire, and Egypt, which had 
been annexed by Cambyses. Perhaps his travels 
extended to southern Spain. Everywhere he 
collected facts for a geographical work which was 
published under the title of a Map of the World. 
But this work ranged beyond the sphere of pure 
geography. There is no doubt that it contained, 
besides descriptions of countries and places, a great 
deal of ethnography and history, and especially it 
introduced the Greeks to oriental history and 
sketched for the first time the successive monarchies 
of Assyria, Media, and Persia. The writer almost 
certainly touched upon the Ionian history of his 
own day, in which he himself played a part. 
Herodotus, you may remember, mentions advice 
tendered by Hecataeus to the lonians on more 
than one occasion, advice which they did not 
follow. The most likely person to record advice 
which has not been followed is the adviser ; and 
we may pretty confidently assume that the source 
of Herodotus was Hecataeus himself 

Hecataeus thus initiated the composition of 
" modern " history, though only in a work which was 
geographical in its title and main argument. He 
also wrote a work on the ancient history of Greece. 
It was a prose compilation from the genealogical 



I HECATAEUS 13 

epics. But, though its title, Genealogies^ shows 
how potent the influence of the epics was, it was 
a critical investigation. The opening words are 
striking and might have stirred a reader to ex- 
pectancy of a thoroughgoing and drastic revision 
of what currently passed for the ancient history of 
Hellas. "What I write here," says Hecataeus, 
"is the account which I considered to be true. 
For the stories of the Greeks are numerous, and in 
my opinion ridiculous." The actual fragments of 
the work would not enable us to judge to what 
lengths his scepticism ventured. The few instances 
of rationalistic interpretation which we can note are 
of a sufficiently innocent kind, but show us that, 
while he did not adopt the doctrine of Xenophanes 
that the myths are fictions, he applied a canon of 
inner probability. For instance, he explained the 
hound of Hades which Heracles was related to 
have dragged up from the under -world, as the 
name of a terrible serpent which haunted Taenarum. 
Again, he transported the home of Geryones and 
his cattle from distant Spain to the more accessible 
pastures of Epirus.^ 

But a clearer view of the attitude of Hecataeus 
may be derived from certain passages in Herodotus 
to which I shall have to draw attention in the next 
lecture. We shall then see that his scepticism in 
regard to the ancient history of the Greeks had 

^ It seems probable it was from his geographical work that Herodotus 
derived the explanation of the legend of the nursing of Cyrus by a female 
dog, as meaning that he was suckled by a woman named Spako, which 
signified dog in the Medic language (Pra§ek). 



14 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

been stimulated by the acquaintance he made 
in Egypt with the historical traditions of the 
Egyptians. There he made the discovery that 
in days when gods were supposed to be walking 
abroad on the hills and in the vales of Hellas, 
Egypt at the distance of a few days' voyage was 
managed exclusively by mere human beings. It 
was an obvious inference that the age of the gods 
in Greece must be relegated to as remote a date as 
the age of the gods in Egypt, and that the heroic 
age of the not very distant ancestors of the existing 
Greeks must be divested of the supernatural 
atmosphere with which poetical fable had encom- 
passed it. We may conclude that the prefatory 
announcement of Hecataeus was not excessive, 
and that his rationalism was more complete than 
the few meagre fragments of the work might lead 
us to suppose. 

Hecataeus, as I have said, wrote in prose. His 
choice of prose was a proof of his competence and 
a condition of his achievement. But prose had, in 
all probability, been used already at Miletus for the 
treatment of a historical subject. The very exist- 
ence of Cadmus the Milesian has been called in 
question by some modern critics, and he is certainly 
a misty figure. The evidence seems to me — though 
I speak with diffidence — ^to point to the conclusion 
that he existed, and was one of the earliest prose 
writers of lonia.^ My idea of Cadmus is that he 

1 Chief sources for Cadmus : Dionys. Hal. De Thuc. 23 ; Strabo i. 2. 
6; Pliny, N.U. v. 31, vii. 56; Josephus, c. Ap. i. 2; Suidas, sub 



I HECATAEUS 15 

lived in the early part of the sixth century, con- 
temporary with Anaximander and Pherecydes of 
Syros, and wrote a book on the Origins of Miletus 
and other Ionian cities, a work which was notable 
only because it was written in prose, and not 
differing in treatment or character from epics like 
the Corinthiaca and Phoronis. This is perhaps the 
best we can do for the reputation of Cadmus ; he 
was a very early prose writer or logographer, but 
there is no reason to suppose that he was more of 
a historian than Eumelus or Eugammon. The 
claim of Hecataeus to be the founder of history 
cannot be disputed in his favour. 

A logographer, as you know, means a writer of 
prose, not specially a historian. 

The early historical literature of the Greeks had 
no distinctive name. It formed part of the general 
prose literature which was then springing up in Ionia 
and which included philosophical and scientific 
works, and, for instance, the fables of Aesop. In 
their nomenclature, the Greeks regarded only the 

nomine. The passages of Strabo and Pliny show that the creation of 
prose was variously ascribed to Cadmus and Pherecydes (of Syros). This 
was, of course, the result of Alexandrine investigation. From Dionysius 
we learn that an extant work which bore the name of Cadmus was 
strongly suspected of being a fabrication. We may take it for granted 
that it was spurious, but it seems highly probable that its subject was 
that of the genuine work which had long since perished. Hence, I 
think, we may pretty securely accept the information of Suidas (whether 
derived from the pseudo- Cadmus or from Alexandrine sources) that 
Cadmus composed ktLctlv MtXijTou koI ttjs SXtjs 'luvias. From Dionysius 
we also infer that Cadmus belonged to a distinctly older generation than 
Hecataeus. The posthumous rivalry between him and Pherecydes for 
the origination of literary prose points to the first half of the sixth 
century ; for Anaximander 's prose treatise on Nature cannot have been 
much later than 550 b.c. Cp. Gomperz, Griechische Denker, i. p. 41. 



16 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

difference of form. The epopoioi had now to be 
distinguished from the logopoioi, the epic poets 
who composed verse from the logo -poets who 
composed prose. The logopoioi were also called 
logographoi, which means exactly the same thing, 
only emphasizing the fact that they used the pen. 
Heracleitus and Sophron were as much logographers 
as Hecataeus. 

History had at first no distinctive name. The 
term laropirj did not then mean what it came to 
mean later. Yet, as it was used by the lonians, 
we may say that it suggested the new element 
which discriminated the logoi of Hecataeus from 
the epics (and, as I suggest, from Cadmus). You 
remember how in Homer a legal dispute is brought 
before a "arap, a man of skill who inquires into the 
alleged facts and decides what the true facts are. 
laropLT} meant an inquisition of this kind. We saw 
that the later epic poets did a certain amount of 
inquiring and comparing, and, in so far as they did 
this, they were leading up to history. But in the 
preface to the Genealogies of Hecataeus the con- 
ception of a historical inquiry stands revealed. 
He endeavoured to deal with his data more or less 
like a Xurajp, and to elicit the truth, applying 
canons of common sense. Of course his methods 
were unsound ; but in his aim and effort he was a 
pioneer, and prose, as he saw, was the right vehicle 
for moving along the new paths which he opened up. 

The rise of prose was probably a condition of 
the rise of history ; it is almost inconceivable that 



I HECATAEUS 17 

history could have emerged from its shell if the 
new vehicle of critical thought had not been there 
to carry it. It was not indeed a foregone con- 
clusion that Hecataeus should choose prose. Verse 
and prose were still rivals, they had not yet 
clearly differentiated their spheres. If Cadmus 
had recorded the foundation of Miletus in prose, 
Xenophanes related the foundation of Colophon 
in metre. Parmenides was writing verse, while 
Heracleitus was expressing his deeper thoughts 
in prose ; it is not insignificant that Heracleitus 
was incomparably the greater thinker. In the 
choice of prose the founder of history displayed 
his insight.^ 

Both sides of the activity of Hecataeus, the 
genealogical in which he is a mythographer, the 
geographical in which he is also a historian, had a 
far-reaching influence on the development of Greek 
historiography ; and announce on the very thres- 
hold its weakness and its strength. In treating 
their " ancient " history the Greeks were always 
to remain under the influence of the epics : the 
sceptre was never to fall from the hands of Homer 
and Hesiod ; and the historical investigation of 
early Greece was never to be anything but at best 
a more or less clarified and arbitrarily rationalised 
mythography. On the other hand, it was the 
treatment of Persia and the East in the Geography 
of Hecataeus that inaugurated "modern" and 

^ The fragments do not enable us to appreciate his style. According 
to Hermogenes {De gen. die. ii. 12) his prose had a charm, but he was less 
careful in composition than Herodotus. 



18 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

"contemporary" history in which the Greeks 
achieved such high excellence. 



§ 3. Early Mythographers 

I may take "ancient" history first. The 
Genealogies of Hecataeus soon led to new works 
on the same subject. In the next generation 
Pherecydes of Leros, who settled at Athens, 
and Acusilaus of Argos — they seem to have 
flourished before the middle of the fifth century 
— again served up the epic legends in prose. 
These writers have no claim to the title of 
historians; they were simply mythographers and 
it would be well always to describe them as such. 

The work of Pherecydes was distinguished by 
its comprehensiveness. He modified the traditions 
for various reasons, but not on any systematic 
principle. For instance, on chronological grounds 
he makes Philammon, instead of Orpheus, accom- 
pany the Argonauts. In order to connect the 
poet Homer with the poet Orpheus, he invents 
genealogical intermediaries. The interpolation of 
links in pedigrees is a feature of his method ; 
and here he is working simply on the lines, and in 
the spirit, of the later epic poets themselves. If 
he modifies a legend, it is not to rationalise, but 
rather in the interests of popular superstition. 
The old legend made Apollo slay the Cyclopes 
because they furnished Zeus with the thunder- 
bolts which destroyed Asclepius. Pherecydes makes 



I MYTHOGRAPHERS 19 

him slay not the Cyclopes but the sons of the 
Cyclopes, evidently to indulge the popular belief 
that the Cyclopes are still busy with the manu- 
facture of thunder.^ We may say then that 
Pherecydes was a systematizer of the epic tradi- 
tions on conservative lines, contrasting not only 
with the revolutionary method of Hecataeus, but 
with the freer treatment of the legends by the 
Attic tragedians. 

In Acusilaus we can detect the influence of 
Hecataeus. He cannot resist the temptation to 
rationalise up to a certain point. He will not 
admit, for instance, that Zeus could change him- 
self into a bull, and so he holds the animal which 
carried off^ Europa to have been a mere common 
bull sent by Zeus, not the metamorphosed god. 
He describes the fleece of Colchis as not golden 
but purple, and explains that it was empurpled by 
sea-water. More interesting than these halting 
concessions to improbable probability is his recon- 
struction of the causes of the Trojan war. He 
asked himself why the goddess Aphrodite should 
have united herself to the Trojan Anchises. Such 
an occurrence as the union of a goddess with a 
mortal required a motive. He found it in an 
oracle that the descendants of Anchises should 
reign when the kingdom of Priam had fallen. 
When her son Aeneas grew to manhood, the 
object of Aphrodite was to bring about the fall 

^ Wilamqwitz-Mollendorif, Isyllos, 65. For the story of Cephalus and 
Procris as told in the epics, Pherecydes substituted what seems to have 
been the family tradition of the Cephalidae. Bertsch, Phereh. Studien, p. 2. 



20 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

of Priam's dynasty, and for this purpose she caused 
Paris to fall in love with Helen. Then when 
Helen had been carried off, she helped the Trojans 
in order that they might not, in despair at defeat, 
surrender Helen and save the throne of Priam. 
The story of the judgment of Paris, which, accord- 
ing to the Cypria, was the original cause of the 
war, is thus rejected, and the war is attributed to 
the ambitious schemes and Machiavellian policy 
of Aphrodite. This is rationalism of a sort. The 
accepted view ascribed the cause of a great move- 
ment to the vanity of a goddess ; Acusilaus, 
retaining the action of the goddess, explained her 
motive as political ambition, and so, raising the 
transaction to a higher level, fancied that he made 
it more credible. 

A later writer, Herodorus of Heraclea, carried 
the method of Hecataeus much further than 
Acusilaus. It will be enough to illustrate the 
character of his mythography by one instance. 
The legend told that Apollo and Poseidon built 
the walls of Troy for King Laomedon. According 
to Herodorus, what really happened was this. 
Laomedon built the walls in the ordinary way, but 
he defrayed the expenses by the sacred treasures 
which had been accumulated in the shrines of 
Poseidon and Apollo. This is an example of the 
method of interpretation by which Herodorus 
sought to explain away the miraculous.^ 

^ Murray has an interesting section on Herodorus in his History of 
Greek Literature, pp. 127 sq. 



I MYTHOGRAPHERS 21 

The work of Pherecydes then represents a 
conservative reaction against the ration ahsm of 
Hecataeus. The compilations of Acusilaus re- 
present a compromise between rationaHsm and 
conservatism, but leaning heavily to the conserva- 
tive side. Herodorus took up the rationalistic 
method of Hecataeus, and developed it further. 
Reason was a gainer by the work of Hecataeus ; it 
is a landmark in the progress of criticism ; but the 
Hecataean method could not advance positive 
knowledge. It led, beyond Herodorus, to Palae- 
phatus and Euemerus ; it led ultimately nowhere, 
and I will not follow it. It was not the mytho- 
graphers, but the Attic tragedians, whose criticism 
of mythology was interesting and illuminating, 
Aeschylus by moralising and Euripides by dis- 
crediting it. 

§ 4. Early Historians 

Hecataeus, the historian, as distinguished from 
the mythographer, had two immediate successors 
who took up the subject of oriental history in 
which he had shown the way. Charon of Lamp- 
sac us ^ composed a history of Persia coming down 
at least as far as the destruction of the fleet of 
Mardonius by a storm off Mount Athos in 492 B.C., 
but probably including the invasion of Xerxes, 
of which he was in the fullest sense a contem- 

^ His Horoi (see below, p. 29) seems to have been published after 
465-4 B.C. Compare Schwartz's article in Paiily-Wissowa. I cannot see 
any proof that the Persica was merely an excerpt from the H6roL 



22 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

/ 
porary.^ His narrative was probably brief, but as 

one of the first historical works which descended 
to the writer's own age it possessed considerable 
importance for the growth of historical composi- 
tion. There was another writer of the same period 
who was perhaps equally important and treated 
the same subject as Charon. Dionysius of Miletus 
likewise wrote a history of Persia which came 
down to the death of Darius and included the 
defeat at Marathon. But he followed this up by a 
continuation which had still greater interest, en- 
titled The Sequel to the Reign of Darius ; which 
narrated the events of the Persian war.^ 

Now while these works of Charon and Dio- 
nysius included very important episodes in the 
history of Greece, they were properly and formally 
histories of Persia. The first Greek writers who 
wrote modern history wrote of Greece only inci- 
dentally. Their theme was the great empire which 
had subjugated a part of Greece and attempted 
to subjugate it all. The circumstance that the 
writers, who undertook to record the relations of 
Greece with Persia, conceived those relations as 
part of the history of the Persian state, had an 
advantage for the unity of the subject. To write 

^ This is the most natural inference from Dionysius, Letter to Pompey, 
3. 7 'EiWavlKov re Kal Xdpuvos r^v air^v virbdecnv (as Herodotus) irpoex- 
5€8wk6twi>. (The Persica of Hellanicus cannot have been prior to the 
composition of Herodotus vii.-ix.) 

2 One fragment of Dionysius (Persica) has been preserved, in the 
scholia on Herodotus (cod. B) iii. 61 (6 fxdyos Uani^ddris) : Aiovijtrios 6 
MiX-Zjo-ios Ilav^oii6T)v dvofid^ecrdat. rodrov \4yei. See Stein's Herodotus (ed. 
1869-71), vol. ii. p. 438. I mention this solitary fragment, because it does 
not appear in Miiller's F.H.O. 



I CHARON AND DIONYSIUS 23 

the history of Greece at almost any period without 
dissipating the interest is a task of immense diffi- 
culty, as any one knows who has tried, because 
there is no constant unity or fixed centre to which 
the actions and aims of the numerous states can be 
subordinated or related. Even in the case of the 
Persian invasion, one of the few occasions on 
which most of the Greek cities were affected by 
a common interest, though acting in various ways 
and from various motives, it facilitated the task of 
the narrator to polarise the events of the cam- 
paigns by following the camp of the invader and 
describing them as part of Persian history, though 
with Hellenic sympathy. But this method of 
treatment was a heritage from Hecataeus. The 
impulse which led to the " Persian " books of 
Charon and Dionysius came from the geographical 
work of Hecataeus, and in all probability he was 
one of their chief guides for oriental history up to 
the Ionic revolt. 

There is one other observation I would make 
about the lost history of Dionysius. He was an 
Ionian, writing after Ionia had been delivered from 
the Persian yoke and had entered the confederacy 
of Delos, with the prospect of becoming dependent 
on Athens. The history of Ionia had not been 
brilliant, politically, during the past hundred years. 
It had been subdued first by Lydia and then by 
Persia ; it had revolted from Persia and ignomin- 
iously failed ; it had been compelled to aid its 
master in attempting to enslave the free Hellenes. 



24 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

It held a somewhat undignified position between 
Persia and free Greece. The Ionian point of 
view was therefore different, necessarily, from the 
Spartan or the Athenian ; and the lonians had 
some reason to feel that their actions were open to 
misconstruction, and that a role, not too heroic, 
would gain in their own telling. In any case the 
story of the Great Invasion told at Miletus would 
have a considerably different colouring from the 
same story related at Susa or at Athens. We may 
reasonably suspect that the history of the war by 
Dionysius had a value for Ionian self-love ; that it 
may have done less than justice to the victorious 
Greeks ; but that it probably did more justice to 
Persia than the enemy would have received from 
an Athenian writer. This Ionian logos of the 
Persian war was, we may conjecture, a challenge 
to unreserved admirers of Athens ; we shall see 
in the next lecture how such a challenge was 
taken up. 

There is another writer of this early school of 
historians whose name I cannot pass over, the 
Carian Greek, Scylax of Caryanda. He was 
employed by Darius to survey the course of the 
river Indus, and he published an account of his 
exploration. But he also wrote a work of con- 
temporary history which centred round the figure 
of his fellow-countryman, Heracleides, Prince of 
Mylasae, who deserted the Persian cause and 
helped the Greeks in the invasion of Xerxes. A 
chance ray of light has recently been shed on 



I SCYLAX 25 

Heracleides by an Egyptian papyrus, which con- 
tains a fragment of the work of the historian 
Sosylus on the Second Punic war/ This frag- 
ment relates to a naval action, probably the battle 
fought at the mouth of the Ebro in 217 b.c. The 
author illustrates a point in the naval tactics by 
comparing a certain action of Heracleides which 
thwarted a Phoenician manoeuvre at the battle of 
Artemisium. The episode is not mentioned by 
Herodotus (though he refers to Heracleides else- 
where) and it probably comes from the work of 
Scylax.^ How far that work was what could be 
called biographical we cannot tell, but it is at least 
noteworthy as the earliest Greek book we know of 
that made an individual the centre of a historical 
narrative. 

We shall not wrong these early historians if we 
describe them as credulous and uncritical. The 
able literary critic, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in 
whose days many of their works were still in exist- 
ence, says that their aim was simply to compile 
and publish traditions and records, " without 
adding or subtracting anything " ; and he appre- 
ciates their style as clear, concise, appropriate to 
the subject, bare of any artificial technique, though 
not careless or ungraceful.^ 

^ Edited, interpreted, and discussed by Wilcken, Hermes, xli. pp. 103 
sqq., 1906. 

^ On this work see Gutschmid, Kleine Schriften, iv. p. 144, who 
thought it must be part of a large work, and WUcken, op. cit. pp. 125-6. 

^ De Thucydide 5. Dionysius distinguishes three chronological 
groups of historians : (1) Cadmus, whom he associates with Aristeas ; 
(2) Eugeon, Deiochus, Eudemus, Democles, Hecataeus, Acusilaus, 



26 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

The historical impulse initiated by Hecataeus 
extended after a time beyond Ionia into the neigh- 
bouring land of Lydia, which had been permeated 
by Greek culture under the last Lydian kings. 
The Lydian Xanthus composed in Greek a history 
of his country for which he used local traditions 
and perhaps consulted inscriptions in the palace of 
Sardis.^ But in the development of historiography 
he is less important than two other writers who, 
like him, wrote during the latter half of the fifth 
century, Antiochus of Syracuse and Hellanicus of 
Lesbos. Antiochus composed a work on the 
history of the western Greeks. He investigated 
the early history of Sicily and Italy and the plan- 
tation of the Greek colonies in those lands. So 
far he was dealing with the subject of origins, in 
which the early historians inherited an interest 
from their epic predecessors, whose legends they 
supplemented and modified by local traditions. 
(The epic itself had here a late offshoot in the 
poem which Panyassis of Halicarnassus produced 
towards the middle of the fifth century on the 
colonisation of the Ionian towns.) But the great 



Charon, Melesagoras (perhaps Aloviktios 6 MtXijo-tos has fallen out after 
'EKaraios 6 M.) ; (3) Hellanicus, Damastes, Xenoraedes, Xanthus, Kal dXXoi 
a-vxvoL. 450 B.C. would roughly mark the division between 2 and 3. The 
work of Eugeon (Euagon) of Samos was appealed to c. 200 b.c. in a 
dispute between Samos and Priene which was decided by Rhodes (see 
Greek Inscriptions in the British Museum, cccciii. 109, 120). Deiochus 
wrote a chronicle of Cyzicus. For Democles see Strabo i. 58 and xii. 
551; for Damastes, F.H.G. ii. 6t-7. The work which passed under 
the name of (A)melesagoras {F.H.G. ii. 21) was a fraud : see Wilamowitz- 
MollendorfF, Antigonos von Karystos, p. 24. 
1 Gutschmid, Kleine Schriften, iv. pp. 307 sqq. 



i 



I ANTIOCHUS; HELLANICUS 27 

significance of Antiochus is that he wrote the 
modern and contemporary history of an important 
section of the Greek world. A comprehensive 
history of western Hellas was a step towards a 
comprehensive history of Hellas as a whole. 

His contemporary, Hellanicus of Lesbos, indi- 
cated, and prepared the way for, a further advance ; 
and it is important to grasp his significance in our 
development. It has been usual to classify him 
with the elder successors of Hecataeus, because he 
wrote in Ionic Greek and covered practically all 
the fields which they had covered. But he broke 
new ground and became, as has been said, "the 
corner-stone" of the historical tradition of the 
Greeks. The range of his literary activity was 
wide. He wrote on the history of Persia ; on the 
customs of the barbarians ; on the mythical period 
of Greece; on the origins of the Greek cities in 
Asia ; on the later history of Greece and especially 
the history of Athens. His principal achievement 
was the construction of a systematic chronology 
which laid the foundations for subsequent research. 

The subject of chronology must have been 
pressed on the attention of Hecataeus, not only 
by his research into Greek genealogies, but by 
his study of Egyptian and oriental history. The 
Greeks had not yet invented any method of 
chronicling events. They had, as we saw, no 
chronological records, except lists of names, Uke 
those of the priestesses of Hera at Argos, of the 
archons at Athens, of the priests of Poseidon at 



28 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

Halicarnassus. It was only rarely that a name in 
these lists would yield the precise date of an event, 
such as the archonship of Solon which supplied at 
once the date of his reforms. Beyond these very 
barren records the only data were the genealogies. 
These furnished a very rough method of reckoning 
periods of time by generations. But there must 
have been considerable perplexity how the genera- 
tion-unit should be calculated in terms of years. 
Ultimately it became usual to reckon three 
generations as equivalent to a hundred years, so 
that the unit was roughly 33 years. But there 
are early traces of another system which equated 
the generation with 23 years, ^ a principle which 
would yield widely different results. There was 
another system based on 40 years. It is probable 
that Hecataeus reckoned generally with genera- 
tions, and not years, as his units, for the more 
distant past. But for "modern" history he had 
valuable auxiliary data of a precise kind. The 
oriental monarchies had an exact method of reckon- 
ing by means of the regnal years of the kings, and 
records of events dated in this way were preserved. 
These dates at once supplied synchronisms with 
events in Greek history and fixed a number of 
chronological landmarks, such as the capture of 
Sardis. But it is not likely that chronology was 
treated by Hecataeus more carefully or methodi- 
cally than by Herodotus ; its fundamental import- 
ance was not realised till later. 

^ See Herodotus i. 7 : 22 generations = 505 years. 



I HELLANICUS 29 

The problem which Hellanicus undertook was 
to reconstruct a complete chronicle of Greek 
history, with the help of the genealogies, lists such 
as that of the Athenian archons, and the oriental 
dates. It is possible that attempts had been made 
to work out this highly speculative problem already. 
Charon had compiled a book called the Horoi of 
Lampsacus. It is generally assumed to have been 
a local history or chronicle of his native city. But 
the fragments suggest that it had a wider range 
than the affairs of Lampsacus. Perhaps the work 
consisted of annals, dated by yearly magistrates of 
Lampsacus, but recording, as well as local events, 
other events also of general historical interest. 
We have a parallel in a vast number of medieval 
chronicles which possess at once a local and a 
general side. Annals of Paderborn, for instance, 
take special account of Paderborn affairs, but also 
record the general history of the Western Empire. 
This is only a conjecture,^ and in any case it was 
reserved for Hellanicus, even if he had the help of 
previous attempts, to achieve the construction of a 
chronicle which in its main lines found general 
acceptance, and influenced the course of subsequent 
chronological study. He made the Ust of the 
Argive priestesses of Hera the framework of his 
general chronicle of Greece.^ He also compiled a 
special chronicle of Attic history, in which events 
were naturally arranged under the archon years 

^ Of Seeck ; see Klio iv. pp. 289-90. We have no data to conjecture 
the scope of Eugeon's Horoi of Samos. 

^ Kullmer refers p. 52 to the Ambracian-Acarnanian war of 429 b.c. 



30 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

from the year 683-2 onward. In its first form, 
this work came down to the year 411. After the 
termination of the Peloponnesian war the author 
continued it to 404 b.c.^ The notices of events 
were brief, but it was not without a certain poli- 
tical colouring, evincing sympathy with Athenian 
democratic patriotism. 

Without entering upon a minute criticism of 
the method of Hellanicus, it is enough to say that, 
mistaking the character of mythical traditions, he 
erected an ingenious edifice on foundations which 
had no solidity. The most perfect genealogies 
could not even approximately determine absolute 
dates ; and the genealogies were full of inconsist- 
encies which had to be overcome by arbitrary 
interpolations and manipulations. Moreover, quite 
recent events, which had not been recorded at the 
time, might present almost insuperable difficulties 
to a chronographer. One case, which we can 
control, will illustrate how dangerous the procedure 
of Hellanicus was. If he had consulted a certain 
inscription, which we are fortunate enough to have 
recovered, he could have found that several military 
events which he chronicled occurred in the same 
archonship, corresponding to the latter half of 
459 B.C. and the former half of 458 B.C. Ignorant 
of this authentic evidence, he distributed these 
events over three archonships.^ Yet these events 

^ See Lehmann-Haupt in Klio vi. pp. 127 sqq. Apollodorus used the 
earlier edition. 

- We can be virtually certain that the chronology of Ephorus and 
Diodorus for the period of the Fifty Years depended on Hellanicus, so far 



I HELLANICUS 81 

must have happened within his own Hfetime. 
His whole chronology of the thirty-five years 
after the Persian war was arbitrary ; and it 
illustrates how in the absence of records pre- 
cise chronology is hopeless. The instance of 
error which I have given suggests another 
observation. There were numerous stones at 
Athens, officially inscribed and precisely dated, 
from which, if they were all preserved, a modern 
student would probably construct without difficulty 
and with absolute certainty an exact chronicle of 
Athenian history in the fifth century. But it 
never occurred to Hellanicus to look for them, 
and in this he was only like most other Greek 
historians. The Greeks used such records when 
they came across them, but as a rule they did not 
seek them out systematically. Was the labour of 
deciphering them too laborious ? It is remarkable 
that Thucydides describes a sixth-century inscrip- 
tion, which he quotes, as written "in faint char- 
acters " ; yet a portion of that same inscription 
which has survived seems to a modern epigrapher 
quite clear, after more than two thousand years. 

When we realise the nature of the data and the 
methods of the first chronologists whose ingenious 
constructions determined the received tradition, 
we shall hardly be prepared to dispute the con- 
as Ephorus may not have modified it by the indications of Thucydides. 
For Thucydides and Hellanicus seem to have been the only fifth-century 
historians who recorded that period. Diodorus distributes over the years 
460-59, 4S9-8, 458-7 events in Egypt, at Halieis, and Aegina, and 
Megara, which, the well-known Erechtheid stone (C.I. A. i. 433) instructs 
us, occurred in the same civil year (459-8). 



32 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

elusion at which Mahaffy arrived more than 
twenty-five years ago, that there are no well- 
estabUshed exact dates in Greek history before the 
seventh century.^ For the seventh and even for 
the sixth there are only a few. Nay, we can hardly 
say that a clear and definite chronicle begins before 
445 B.C., the year of the Thirty Years' Peace. 

It is to be deplored that the early historians 
failed to realise how desirable it was to reckon 
time by a fixed chronological era. The practical 
Romans dated historical events from the Founda- 
tion of the City. The Greeks might have adopted, 
for instance, the year of the invasion of Xerxes. 
They could have dated Before and After, irpo rcbv 
MrjSiKMv and jj^eTa TO, MTjBtKd, as we do with our 
era. But the most natural, and perhaps the best, 
chronological starting-point would have been the 
Trojan war. It did not matter in the least that 
the actual date of that event could not be known 
with certainty, so long as a definite year was fixed 
upon. Our era is not the true date of the Nativity; 
the true date cannot be ascertained ; but this does 
not affect the utility of the conventional era. Now 
as a matter of fact the Trojan war was occasion- 
ally used, as a sort of reference date, by fifth- 
century historians,^ and it is much to be regretted 
that Hellanicus did not systematically adopt this 

^ The subject of the early list of Olympian victors, constructed by 
Hippias of Elis without trustworthy data, has recently been discussed by 
A. Korte {Hermes xxxix. pp. 224 sqq., 1904), who confirms in essential 
points the conclusions of Mahaffy. 

2 Herodotus ii. 145 ad Jin. 



I HELLANICUS 33 

method of reckoning. The years of magistrates 
or priests are not only clumsy, but convey 
no chronological idea. For it is to be observed 
that when dates are expressed by cardinal numbers 
proceeding from a fixed year, not only is calculation 
simplified, but the numbers present to the mental 
vision a clear historical perspective. 

But recognising the defects both in the mechan- 
ism and in the methods of Hellanicus, who 
attempted the impossible, we must give him credit 
for having framed the ideal of a chronological 
system which should embrace all the known facts 
of history ; and if he established many erroneous 
dates, it is probable that he also rescued some 
that were correct. 

§ 5. Summary 

To sum up. (1) The historical study of their 
past by the Greeks arose out of the epic tradition 
and was a continuation of the work of the later 
epic poets. The tradition of the Homeric and 
Hesiodic poets maintained its control to the end. 
What we would designate as the post-mythical 
or historical period overlapped by means of gene- 
alogies with the mythical period ; the existing 
families of Greece were connected in line of 
blood with the heroes and thereby with the gods. 
The genealogical principle, lying at the base of 
their historical reconstruction, hindered the Greeks 
from drawing a hard and fast line between the 
mythical and the historical age. The historians 



34 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

who approached the subject never got beyond 
criticism of details and rationahstic interpretation 
of miracles. But (2) at the very time when the 
study of mythological tradition began to assume a 
more critical character, the interest of the Greeks 
expanded to the "modern" history and institu- 
tions of non-Greek states, and here they were in 
a region not mythical, but historical. This intel- 
lectual movement originated in Ionia ; its main 
cause was the Persian conquest, and the resulting 
contact of Ionian thinkers with oriental history. 
The rise of Ionian science not only promoted the 
spirit of criticism, but also created an interest in 
geography, for the study of which the new political 
status of Ionia furnished opportunities ; but it was 
principally the new vision of oriental history that 
brought to birth Greek historiography. It was 
from the "modern" history of the East that the 
Greeks went on to study the "modern" history of 
Hellas. And the struggle with Persia in the first 
twenty years of the fifth century impelled them 
to begin to write histories of their own time. 
Further, as I will attempt to show more fully in 
the next lecture, their contact with the traditions 
of non-Greek lands within the Persian empire 
suggested to the Greeks a new kind of criticism of 
their own mythical traditions. In all three fields 
of ancient, modern, and contemporary history, as 
well as in the allied sphere of geography, Hecataeus 
was a pioneer ; his originality lay in responding to 
the stimulus from the non-Greek world. 



I SUMMARY 35 

The work of Hellanicus, who conceived the idea 
of a general history of Greece and laid the slippery- 
foundations of its chronology, has brought us to a 
date from which we shall have to retrace our steps 
to examine the work of a greater writer than any 
of those who have claimed our attention to-day. 
We have only considered those points of light, 
obscured by time, which form the Ionian constella- 
tion ; we have yet to examine a star of the first 
magnitude which is still as luminous as ever. 
Herodotus (we must not call him an Ionian) will 
be the subject of the next lecture. 



LECTURE II 



HERODOTUS 



In the last lecture the necessities of our subject 
obliged us to consider works of which only scraps 
have survived, and of which we can form only dim 
ideas by groping methods, although we may feel 
tolerably confident as to the general character 
and value of the literature to which they belong. 
The names of their authors are forgotten by the 
world, and their chief function now is to tantalise 
the special student of literature or history. To-day 
we come to a work which time has not been 
allowed to destroy or diminish. 

Of the life of Herodotus, son of Lyxes, of 
Halicarnassus, we know hardly anything except 
what may be gleaned from his own statements. 
Born early in the fifth century, he left his birth- 
place before 454 b.c., banished by Lygdamis the 
tyrant, who put his cousin Panyassis, the epic 
poet, to death. He stayed apparently for some 
time in Samos, and then went to Athens, whence 
he proceeded to Italy as one of the first citizens 
of the new colony of Thurii (443 B.C.). He sur- 
vived the first years of the Peloponnesian war 



LECT. II HERODOTUS 37 

(431-0 B.c.^). Into this framework we have to 
fit his travels, which included the coasts of the 
Euxine, Babylon, Phoenicia, Egypt, and probably 
Cyrene. It is not necessary to discuss the dis- 
puted subject of the chronology of his journeys. 
I need only say that his most important journeys, 
those to Babylonia and Egypt, were probably 
undertaken in the later period of his life, while 
he was a citizen of Thurii. The years which 
elapsed between his banishment from his native 
city and his departure for his new home seem to 
have been spent in Greece, perhaps chiefly at 
Athens, and to have been devoted, as we shall 
see, to investigating and composing the story of 
the invasion of Xerxes. Though he may naturally 
have visited Athens again, on his way to or from 
the East, there is no evidence to entitle us to 
presume, as some have thought, that he deserted 
Thurii permanently and dwelled at Athens during 
the last years of his life.^ 

The argument of his history is a narrative of 
the relations between the Greeks and the oriental 
powers from the accession of Croesus to the 
capture of Sestos in 478 b.c. — a " modern " history 
in the fullest sense of the term. The division into 
nine Books is not due to the author himself, for 



^ There are passages which cannot have been written before 431-0 
B.C. vii. 233 (cp. Thucydides ii. 2) and ix. 73 (cp. Thuc. ii. 23) imply 431 
B.C. ; vii. 137 (cp. Thuc. ii. 67) imphes430B.c. Cp. alsoiii. 160; and v. 77. 
The reference to Artaxerxes in vi. 98 does not imply that the words were 
written after his death (425 b.c.) ; cp. Macan's note ad loc. 

^ Compare the pertinent remarks of Wachsmuth, Bheinisches Museum, 
Ivi. 215-8 (1901). 



38 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

in his day such divisions had not yet come into 
fashion. But the Alexandrine editor who was 
responsible for it was a man of extraordinary 
insight. His distribution perfectly exhibits the 
construction of the book and could not be im- 
proved by any change. But it can be rendered 
more perspicuous by observing that each of the 
nine Books is truly a sub-division and that the 
primary partition is a threefold one.^ The work 
falls naturally into three sections, each consisting 
of three parts. The first section, or triad of 
Books, comprises the reigns of Cyrus and Cambyses, 
and the accession of Darius ; the second deals with 
the reign of Darius ; the third with that of 
Xerxes. The first is mainly concerned with 
Asia including Egypt ; the second with Europe ; 
the third with Hellas. The first displays the rise 
and the triumphs of the power of Persia ; the 
last relates the defeat of Persia by Greece ; while 
the middle triad represents a chequered picture, 
Persian failure in Scythia and at Marathon, Greek 
failure in Ionia. And each of the nine sub- 
divisions has a leading theme which constitutes 
a minor unity. Cyrus is the theme of the first 
Book, Egypt of the second, Scythia of the fourth, 
the Ionian rebellion of the fifth, Marathon of the 
sixth. The seventh describes the invasion of 
Xerxes up to his success at Thermopylae ; the 
eighth relates the reversal of fortune at Salamis ; 
the final triumphs of Greece at Plataea and ^lycale 

^ This has been well brought out by Macan. 



11 HERODOTUS 39 

occupy the ninth. In the third alone the unity is 
less marked ; yet there is a central interest in the 
dynastic revolution which set Darius on the throne. 
Thus the unity of the whole composition sharply 
displays itself in three parts, of which each again 
is threefold.^ The simplicity with which this 
architectural symmetry has been managed, with- 
out any apparent violence, constraint, or formality, 
was an achievement of consummate craft. The 
writer's management of the digressions, for which 
he is notorious, is hardly less striking, exhibiting 
a rare skill in the choice of the best and perhaps 
the only fitting places to stow away loose material 
he wished to make use of 

But, perfect as is the architectural unity of the 
work of Herodotus, it would seem that the plan 
as it was finally carried out was not conceived 
when he commenced to write, and that the unity 
was achieved not in conformity to a design 
thought out from the beginning, but by a process 
of expansion due to an after-thought. There is a 
variety of internal evidence which points con- 
vincingly to the conclusion that the last three 
Books were composed before the first six, and 
there are indications that he wrote this portion 
between 4)56 and 445 B.C., before he began his 
travels.^ The natural inference is that he origin- 
ally contemplated no more than a history of the 

^ In the last part the unity is much more marked than the triplicity ; 
in fact, the division of Book vii. from Book viii. is somewhat arbitrary. 

^ The most complete appreciation of the evidence will be found in 
the Introduction to Macan's ed. of Herodotus, vii.-ix. (§ 7 and § 8). 



40 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

invasion of Xerxes ; and that it was in the course 
of his travels that he conceived the idea of a 
larger work, of which the "Invasion of Xerxes" 
should form the finale. The idea doubtless 
shaped itself gradually ; and the first six Books 
were not composed in the order in which they 
stand. But the author has worked with such 
skill that only a searching analysis has detected 
the series of facts which demonstrate the priority 
of the last three Books ^ and make it clear that 
the Persian war was his original inspiration. 

At whatever moment the idea of expanding 
his original history to its fuller compass presented 
itself, whether it was suggested by his journeys 
or prompted him to become a traveller, it was 
certainly connected closely with his travels, and 
the occurrence of long geographical excursus is 
one of the most striking features of the expansion. 

So strongly marked indeed is the geographical 
element, so long are the geographical sections, in 
the work of Herodotus, that some critics have 
been led to think that considerable parts of it 
were originally intended to form part of a 



^ Some few additions were made subsequently : thus in vii. 93 and 108 
there are references to passages in the books which are earlier in order 
but were later in composition. It is probable that the whole work never 
received a final revision, and this would be sufficient to explain the unful- 
filled promise of vii. 213, which is the insufficient but only real argument 
for the hypothesis that the ninth Book is not complete. [How gratuitous 
this hypothesis is, Macan shows at length, ib. § 6.] On the other hand it 
seems not improbable that Herodotus intended to include in the early 
portion of his work a summary of Babylonian history {'Aa-ffvpioL \6yoi) : 
this seems to me more Ukely than that in i. 106 and 184 he is referring 
to another work. 



II HERODOTUS 41 

geography, and were afterwards incorporated in 
his history. There is nothing that compels us to 
adopt a hypothesis of this kind. Association with 
geography was a characteristic of the early 
historical literature of the Greeks, and these 
excursus in Herodotus attest the influence of the 
Hecataean school, and were natural in the work 
of a historian who was himself a traveller. And 
it is worth observing that when he was writing, 
both Egypt and Scythia, the subjects of his 
longest historico- geographical digressions, had a 
particular practical interest for the Athenians ; 
and of the Greek public it was unquestionably 
the Athenians to whom the historian designed 
his work pre-eminently to appeal. I need only 
remind you of the Athenian adventure in Egypt 
in the middle of the fifth century and of the 
voyage of Pericles in the Euxine Sea. It has 
even been conjectured that this Periclean expedi- 
tion (444 B.C.) was the occasion of the historian's 
visit to the Pontic regions. However this may 
be, it is not insignificant, in judging these digres- 
sions, that Egypt and Scythia possessed, at the 
time Herodotus wrote, an interest of a political 
kind, subordinate indeed to that of Persia, but 
distinctly actual. 

It is also to be noted that the digressions in 
general had an artistic justification. They are an 
epic feature, deliberately designed ; ^ one of the 
epic notes of the work. Homer was the literary 

•* He says expressly that irpoffOiiKai are a feature of his work, iv. 30. 



42 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

master of Herodotus ; without imitating him in 
any obvious way, the first great master of prose 
studied and caught the secrets of his effects. By 
means of digressions he achieved epic variety. 
We cannot do better than read the observations 
of the accompUshed Uterary critic Dionysius.^ 
"Herodotus knew that every narrative of great 
length wearies the ears of the hearer, if it dwell 
without a break on the same subject ; but, if 
pauses are introduced at intervals, it affects the 
mind agreeably. And so he desired to lend 
variety to his work and imitated Homer. If we 
take up his book, we admire it to the last syllable, 
and always want more." 

Besides diversifying his work with digressions 
and episodes, Herodotus adopted another epic 
feature, not less characteristic. Like Homer, the 
historian makes his characters speak. He intro- 
duces not only short and pointed conversations, 
but dialogues and orations of considerable length. 
For instance, Xerxes, Mardonius, and Artabanus 
make each a speech in Council before it is decided 
to invade Greece. I may recall the conversations 
of Solon with Croesus, of Xerxes with Artabanus 
and with Demaratus ; and the speech made by 
the Corinthian envoy when the Spartans were 
considering the policy of forcing Athens to restore 
the Peisistratids.^ If the historian were charged 



* Letter to Pompeitts, 3. Longinus calls Herodotus 6fi7}piKd)TaTo$, De 
suhl. 13. 4. 

2 V. 92. Compare Stahl's article mentioned in the Bibliography. 



II HERODOTUS 43 

with abusing this artifice by introducing in the 
Corinthian envoy's speech a long episode from 
Corinthian history, which is really quite irrelevant, 
he could appeal to the discourses of Phoenix and 
Nestor in Homer ; and this case illustrates the 
fact that in introducing speeches he was influenced 
by the Ionian epic and not by the Athenian drama. 
It is impossible to say whether any of the older 
prose writers had adopted this practice, which 
makes the scenes vivid and the work alive. The 
bits of Hecataeus we possess are too brief to 
judge ; but I may note that in one case at least 
he put words into the mouth of an actor. ^ 

The Homeric qualities of Herodotus, which 
communicate to his history an epic flavour, accord 
with the object to produce a work which like 
Homer should fascinate the minds of men. It 
was his aim to hold his audience or readers 
entertained ; to do for his own world in prose 
what Homer had done for the ancient world in 
numbers. We cannot tell how far any of his 
prose predecessors had sought to make their 
works attractive or entertaining,^ or whether the 
influence of epic poetry affected their method 
of presentation. But we may confidently say 
that Herodotus was the first who discerned in 
" modern " history the possibilities of a treatment 



1 Fr. 353 (Longinus, De subl. 27). Cp. Mahaify, ^ Prose Writers, 
i. p. 33. The statement in Marcellinus, Vita Thuc. 38, has not much 
weight. 

^ Thucydides i. 23 (Xoyoypacjioi) is not , conclusive ; he was thinking 
chiefly, perhaps only, of Herodotus. 



44 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

which was epic, and not Hesiodic but Homeric, 
in spirit and style. 

His theme, the struggle of Greece with the 
Orient, possessed for him a deeper meaning than 
the political result of the Persian war. It was 
the contact and collision of two different types of 
civilisation, of peoples of two different characters 
and different political institutions. In the last 
division of his work, where the final struggle of 
Persia and Greece is related, this contrast between 
the slavery of the barbarian and the liberty of the 
Greek, between oriental autocracy and Hellenic 
constitutionalism, is ever present and is forcibly 
brought out. But the contrast of Hellenic with 
oriental culture pervades the whole work ; it 
informs the unity of the external theme with the 
deeper unity of an inner meaning. It is the key- 
note of the history of Herodotus. The digressions 
and stories which delay the action, besides their 
intrinsic interest, and besides their epic use as 
pleasant pauses, have also the value of sounding 
that note, and of contributing distinctly, but 
without emphasis or iteration, towards impressing 
that contrast on the reader's mind. The interview, 
for example, of Croesus with Solon, the self-con- 
fident Eastern potentate with the thoughtful, self- 
controlled Greek, strikes this chord loudly ; and most 
of the oriental and Hellenic stories are calculated 
to suggest the antithesis which finds its supreme 
expression, and is more elaborately wi'ought out, 
in the final collision of the Persian wars. 



II HERODOTUS 45 

In the execution of this conception the Hero- 
dotean work has assumed the character of a study 
in the history of civihsation. Just as the Homeric 
poems present a large and living picture of the 
culture of ancient Greece, so the history of Hero- 
dotus gives us panoramic views of the Hellenic 
civilisation of the sixth century, and describes the 
cultures of all the Eastern peoples who directly or 
indirectly come within range. 

And if it is a study in the history of civilisation, 
we may also say that it has certain features of a 
universal history. It is not universal either in 
space or in time. Not in time ; it does not 
attempt to go back far in Greek history, and only 
touches upon the ancient period incidentally. Not 
in space, for it hardly touches upon the Western 
Greeks at all, and does not include what Hecataeus 
would have supplied about the peoples of the 
Western Mediterranean. But it has the higher 
quality of what we mean by universal history or 
Weltgeschichte, in focussing under one point of 
view, and fitting into a connected narrative, the 
histories of the various peoples who came into 
relations with one another, within a given range ; 
so that they are drawn out of their isolation and 
recognised to have a meaning, greater or less, in 
the common history of man. Within that range, 
which is determined by his theme, Herodotus 
is irreproachably comprehensive ; and his book, 
though he never formulates the idea, is a lesson 
in the unity of history. 



46 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS, lect. 

Although Herodotus does not enter upon the 
history of the heroic period, he has frequently 
occasion to refer to mythical tradition, and here 
he shows himself distinctly a sceptic. Not that 
he was a rationalist in regard to theology generally, 
or had any clear and consistent philosophical view. 
He looked upon human life as under the control 
of superhuman powers, who in exercising their 
incalculable government were prompted by motives 
of envy and nemesis or righteous anger, who acted 
to some extent on principles of justice and retribu- 
tion, and who might communicate knowledge to 
men by means of oracles, portents, or dreams. 
But any further converse of gods with men, any 
divine appearances alleged to have happened in 
recent times, Herodotus is not prepared to accept, 
though he is never dogmatic. His philosophy was 
not strong enough to deny that the gods had ever 
carried on the sort of intercourse with men that is 
described in the epics, or generated human progeny; 
for his ultimate line between the divine and the 
human was not fast. But it was a great comfort 
for common sense and everyday experience, to push 
the age in which such things could happen as far 
back as possible. Herodotus reveals unmistak- 
ably his incredulity about all the mythical wonders 
in which, according to tradition, ancestors of 
living people, some fifteen or twenty generations 
back, played bright or shady parts. He accepted 
the genealogies, but when he got to Perseus or 
Heracles, he did not regard them as sons of a god. 



II HERODOTUS 47 

Heracles is the son of Amphitryon, Helen is the 
daughter of Tyndareus. Sometimes he relates 
legends or tells tales involving superhuman agency, 
but he never takes any responsibility for them, and 
occasionally treats them with delicate irony. He 
mentions a legend of the Thessalians that the 
ravine through which the Peneius makes its way 
to the sea was wrought by Poseidon. "Their 
tale is plausible ; and any one who thinks that 
Poseidon shakes the earth and that clefts produced 
by earthquakes are the works of that god, would 
on seeing this mountain-ravine ascribe it to Posei- 
don. For it appeared to me to be the result of an 
earthquake." Gibbon might have taken lessons in 
the art of irony from Herodotus as well as from 
Pascal. Consider again the admirable caution with 
which he speaks of the divine snake said to live 
on the Athenian Acropolis. ** The Athenians say 
that a great snake lives in the Sanctuary as 
guardian of the citadel ; and they present a honey- 
cake every month as to a creature existing " (w? 
eovTi). This commits him to nothing. 

But though disposed to accept only what 
experience led him to regard as possible, in any 
given case, Herodotus, as I have said, did not draw 
theoretically a hard and fast line between the 
human and the divine ; and he did not reject as 
ridiculous the notion that at one time gods moved 
visibly on the earth and consorted with men. 
Why then did he reject the divine parentage of 
heroes like Heracles and Perseus ? It is important 



48 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

to comprehend the reason for this scepticism which 
he derived from Hecataeus. I touched on tliis 
point in the first lecture. It was not due to the 
canons of Ionian science or to the influence of 
Ionian philosophy. It was due to the study of 
comparative mythology which had opened for 
Hecataeus a new perspective of the world's history. 
The Egyptian studies which Herodotus pursued in 
the footsteps of the Milesian traveller taught him 
that human history in that country went back for 
thousands of years before the age of the gods was 
reached. The Egyptians, for instance, had a god 
corresponding to Heracles, and they reckoned that 
17,000 years had elapsed since he had appeared in 
Egypt. Hence the conclusion which Herodotus 
accepts that there was an ancient god Heracles, 
but that he must be sharply distinguished from 
the human son of Amphitryon, ancestor of the 
Heracleidae.^ The Greek tradition that the age in 
which gods walked the earth was still current some 
eight or nine hundred years ago could not be true. 
For even apart from the suggestions of compara- 
tive mythology, it was inadmissible to suppose that 
while Egypt was in a prosaic age of mere men, 
Greece was trodden by deities and the scene of 
miracles ; and the Egyptian tradition was vouched 
for by records. The argument demolished the 
received mythology of the heroic age so far as it 
was superhuman. 

1 Similarly Pan son of Penelope, Dionysus son of Seraele, are to be 
distinguished from the synonymous gods. 



II HERODOTUS 49 

Herodotus deserves credit for having accepted 
the argument, to which contemporary writers like 
Pherecydes were deaf; and if he asks pardon from 
the gods and heroes for his boldness, this does not 
mean that he felt hesitation or reluctance ; it was 
merely an insincere and graceful genuflexion. He 
was doing what a Christian preacher sometimes 
does, when having delivered an extremely heterodox 
sermon he winds up with a formal homage to 
orthodox dogma. Herodotus is extremely cour- 
teous, perhaps ironically courteous, to both parties. 
He says, as it were, to the gods and heroes, 
" Please, do not be angry with me, — supposing you 
to exist. But at this time of day, you know, one 
must really draw the line somewhere." On the 
other hand he says to the infidels who disbelieve 
in oracular prophecy, " I know you will think me 
credulous. But still in this case the evidence is so 
remarkably clear that I do not see my way to 
resisting it."^ The mythological argument, how- 
ever, of which I am speaking was not due to 
Herodotus himself. He may have put it in his 
own way, and added some points, but he owed it, 
as I have said, to Hecataeus. It has long been 
recognised that his description of Egypt is not an 
original work, put together exclusively from his 
own observations and inquiries, but largely repro- 
duces the account which Hecataeus had given 
in his Map of the World. When Herodotus 
visited Egypt, he doubtless had the book of 

^ Cp. viii. 77. 



50 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

Hecataeus with him, and used it like a barrister's 
brief for cross-examining the temple-servants and 
guiding him in his investigations. He added 
corrections and new information, but the great 
Ionian supplied the groundwork. He does not 
say so ; he does not acknowledge his debt to 
Hecataeus ; for, as you know, the ancients had 
very different views from the moderns about 
literary obligations. It was not the fashion or 
etiquette to name your authorities except for some 
special reason, — for instance, to criticize them, or 
to display your own learning ; and you were not 
considered a plagiarist if you plundered somebody 
else's work without mentioning his name. Heca- 
taeus brought out the importance of the Nile by 
the striking phrase that Egypt was the gift of the 
river ; Herodotus adopts the phrase as if it were 
his own. One of the most convincing tests by 
which suspected plagiarism can be established is 
the occurrence of the same mistakes. Now Hero- 
dotus reproduces the errors which Hecataeus had 
committed about the hippopotamus. But there 
are a whole series of points in which we can trace 
the contact between the two writers in regard to 
Egypt. As for the mythology, we are left in no 
doubt because Herodotus names Hecataeus in this 
connexion. " When Hecataeus was in Thebes he 
told his pedigree to the priests and connected him- 
self with a god in the sixteenth generation. And 
the priests did to him what they did to me, though 
/ did not relate my pedigree. They took him into 



II HERODOTUS 51 

the hall of the temple and showed him wooden 
statues of the high priests. The high priesthood 
descends from father to son, and each high priest 
sets up his own statue in his lifetime. They 
counted 345 statues, and they set this genealogy 
against that of Hecataeus, but they did not derive 
their pedigree from a god or a hero." ^ 

The author's motive in naming his predecessor 
here is, obviously, to rally him for having "given 
himself away" by stating his own genealogy and 
divine ancestry to the priests. "/ was not so 
incautious " is the implication. But we have no 
right to infer that Hecataeus had not already 
drawn the sceptical conclusions which Herodotus 
explains. The sceptical words with which Heca- 
taeus introduced his Genealogies show that he was 
not deaf to the lessons in history which he learned 
in Egyptian temples. His very expression, when 
he says that " the logoi of the Hellenes are absurd," 
not " the stories of the poets," suggests the con- 
trast of non-Hellenes whose logoi he had compared. 
The distinction of what the Greeks say from what 
the Persians, Phoenicians, or Egyptians say often 
recurs in Herodotus, and is an echo, I believe, 
from Hecataeus.^ But we have another proof. 
Herodotus cites the Egyptian priests as dating 
the age of the gods in relation to the reign of 

1 ii. 143. 

^ When Herodotus cites what oV'^W-qves say, it is sometimes assumed 
that he means Hecataeus (or some other Ionian writer). In that case he 
would have said ol "luves. He is really quoting criticisms of Hecataeus 
on 01 '"EiW-qves, that is, on the current mythology of epic tradition. 



52 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

Amasis. As the visit of Hecataeus to Egypt 
would have fallen not long after the death of 
Amasis, the dating indicates that Herodotus was 
copying the statement of Hecataeus. 

The note of scepticism, perhaps we may say the 
characteristic note of Ionian scepticism, is struck 
in the first paragraphs of the Herodotean work. 
It opens with the statement of a theory that the 
wars of the Greeks and Persians were the mani- 
festation of a secular antagonism between Asia 
and Europe — what our English historian. Freeman, 
was fond of calling the Eternal Question. This at 
least is the abstract way we should formulate the 
tenor of the statement which I may abbreviate as 
follows : — " The quarrel began thus : Phoenician 
traders carried off from Argos lo the king's 
daughter. Subsequently Greek adventurers from 
Crete carried off the princess Europa from Tyre. 
The next aggression came from the Greek side, 
when the Argonauts ravished Medea from Colchis. 
The Asiatic reply to this outrage was the rape of 
Helen by Paris. The Trojan war which followed 
generated in Asia a feeling of hostility to the 
Greeks, and the Persian war was the ultimate 
issue of this feeling." But the theory was not 
originated by Herodotus. He disavows all respon- 
sibility. It was a theory of the Persians, he tells 
us, and he states it only to set it aside in his 
ironical way. 

The whole passage reads as if it might be the 
condensation of a friendly discussion between a 



II HERODOTUS 53 

Greek and a Persian as to the responsibility for 
the Persian war. It was undeniable that the 
Persians and not the Greeks had been the aggres- 
sors ; the conquest of Ionia by Cyrus had been the 
beginning. The Persian advocate could only 
remove the blame from Asia by going farther 
back. The summary I gave of the argument does 
not reproduce its flavour, and I will take the. 
liberty of throwing it into the form of a dialogue. 

Persian. The Greeks had no business in Asia. 
They belong to Europe, and they should have 
stayed there. Their expedition against Troy was 
the first trespass ; it began their encroachments 
on a continent which belongs to Asiatic peoples of 
whom the Persians are the heirs. 

Greek. Oh, but you are forgetting that on that 
occasion the Trojans were the offenders ; Paris 
carried off Helen. 

Persian. That was no sufficient reason ; but 
even if it were, the act of Paris was only a 
reprisal for the Greek crimes of carrying off 
Medea and Europa. And the Asiatics were far 
too sensible to make a causa belli of such foohsh 
elopements. 

Greek. Well, if you go back so far, you must 
go back farther still. What about the rape of lo 
from Argos ? 

Persian. Well, yes, I admit it. That was a 
Phoenician business, and we Persians must allow 
that the Phoenicians began the mischief, though 
we hold you really responsible, through your folly 



54 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

in taking such an affair seriously. Only fools 
would make war on account of such escapades. 
Men of the world know that, if these women were 
carried off, they were not more reluctant than 
they should be.^ 

Evidently we have here an invention of Ionian 
esprit. The nature of the argument, dealing as it 
does entirely with Greek legend, shows that the 
Persian was a fictitious disputant ; and the attribu- 
tion of the theory to a Persian is an effect of 
literary subtlety quite in the manner of Voltaire. 
Though Herodotus thought little of this specula- 
tion about ancient wrongs, he seems to have taken 
it as seriously meant. " Whatever we think about 
all this," he says, " I will begin with the first Eastern 
monarch who undoubtedly committed injustice 
against Greece, Croesus, who subdued Ionia without 
provocation." But it is highly significant that he 
should place in the portals of his work a speculation 
which set mythical tradition in a ridiculous light. 

The passage I have discussed is one of several 
that evince those acute tendencies in the Hellenic 
mind which culminated in the movement of the 
Sophists. For instance, the story of the wife of 
Intaphernes. She chose to save her brother rather 
than her husband or children, on the ground that 
husband and children might be replaced but she 
could never have another brother. That is a clever 
Ionian subtlety ; there is no reason to suppose that 
it was invented in the period of the Sophists. Or 

^ Plutarch, Hepl r^s "Rpo^brov KaKo-qdeias, 2, takes this quite seriously. 



II HERODOTUS 55 

take the demonstration of the power of custom by 
Darius. He dismayed some Greeks by the ques- 
tion what they would take to eat their dead 
fathers, and then equally horrified some Indians 
of a tribe who ate dead parents, by asking them 
how much they would take to cremate theirs. 
The immense power of custom was an observation 
redolent of the age of the Wise Men ; Pindar, 
whom Herodotus quotes, designated Custom as 
king of the world ; and the idea afterwards became 
the basis of sophistic theories. The story quoted 
by Herodotus is a drastic Ionian illustration. 

Again, the famous discussion of the comparative 
merits of democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy by 
the seven Persian conspirators who overthrew the 
false Smerdis, belongs also to pre-sophistic specu- 
lation. It is obviously a fiction ; for the discussion 
was appropriate in the Greek world, but was quite 
out of place in Persia. But it was not a fiction of 
Herodotus, for he states expressly (careful though 
he generally is not to commit himself) that these 
opinions were really uttered by the Persian noble- 
men, although some of the Greeks consider this 
incredible. The historian was taken in, just as he 
was taken in by the persiflage about the rapes of 
the fair women of legend. There can hardly be 
much doubt that some publicist threw his re- 
flexions on the comparative merits of constitutions 
into the shape of this historical deliberation. The 
distinction of three fundamental types of constitu- 
tion is older than the period of the Sophists ; it is 



56 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

recognised in an ode of Pindar not later than 473 
B.C., and it was then probably a commonplace.^ 
We may suspect that we have to do with some 
publication of the first half of the fifth century. 

Now there is one feature common to these 
passages. Greek ideas and reflexions are trans- 
ferred to an Eastern setting or connected with 
Persian history. Their origin was assuredly 
Ionian.^ They betray the naive interest of the 
lonians in their masters, and show the Greek mind 
projecting its own reflexions into a world of which 
it had only a half-knowledge, with the instinct 
of making that world more interesting and sym- 
pathetic.^ 

But I must return to the scepticism of Herodo- 
tus. I have already observed that in the historical 
post - Homeric period the mythopoeic faculty of 
the Greeks did not slumber, but myth now took 
the form of the historical anecdote, or, as the 
Germans call it, *' historische Novelle." Here 



1 Pyth. ii. 87-8. 

"^ The clear allusion of Otanes, in his defence of democracy, to the 
Athenian constitution under the lot-system does not necessitate by any 
means an Athenian origin. — It may be conjectured that the peculiar 
privileged position which Otanes and his descendants were said to have 
held in the Persian realm suggested the idea of transferring this singularly 
Hellenic discussion to Susa. Otanes, it is said, was exempted from sub- 
jection to the kings because, though he was the leading organizer of the 
conspiracy, he resigned all claims to the throne which Darius secured. 
He was thus neither ruler nor subject, an anomalous position which in 
Greece had a sort of parallel in the membership of a democracy. Hence 
the suggestion that Otanes believed in democracy, and, when he did not 
convince his fellow-conspirators, obtained for himself personally and his 
family the freedom which a democracy bestows. 

3 I have been here expressing dissent from the view of some critics that 
the passages enumerated indicate sophistic influence. 



II HERODOTUS 57 

they showed consummate felicity in constructing 
stories with historical background, historical actors, 
historical motives, and possessing, many of them, 
a perpetual value because they are seasoned with 
worldly wisdom and enshrine some criticism of life. 
These tales differ from the old myths not only in 
the tendency to point a moral, but also in the 
circumstance that for the most part they do not 
involve physical impossibilities, though they may 
imply highly improbable coincidences, or what we 
may call psychical or political impossibilities. The 
work of Herodotus is richly furnished with these 
tales ; he had a wonderful flair for a good story ; 
and the gracious garrulity with which he tells his- 
torical anecdotes is one of the charms which will 
secure him readers till the world's end. Gibbon 
happily observed that Herodotus "sometimes 
writes for children and sometimes for philo- 
sophers " ; the anecdotes he relates often appeal 
to both. He accepts them generally at their face 
value, and most of them have been taken as more 
or less literally true till very recent times. The 
story of the intercourse between Croesus and 
Solon was rejected as fiction only because it seemed 
impossible to reconcile it with chronology.^ But 
we are now more sceptical about good stories of 
this type, and we have come to see how often they 

^ It may be held, however, that this is still an open question. A 
fragment of an anonymous Dialogue, discovered by Greiifell and Hunt 
{Oxyrhynchus Papyri, iv. No. 664), represents Solon as in Ionia when 
Peisistratus became tyrant (560 b.c). If this were so, the meeting with 
Croesus would become chronologically possible. 



58 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

are wrought upon, or woven into, some ancient 
motif, which is adapted to a historical setting. 
The tale of the funeral pyre of Croesus sprang 
from the burning of the Assyrian god Sandan ; it 
was an up-to-date version of the legend of Sar- 
danapalus. The story of the ring of Polycrates 
turns on an old motive, the finding of something 
lost in a fish's belly, but its point in connexion with 
Polycrates has been explained only the other day. 
The casting of the ring into the sea was symbolic 
of thalassocracy ; it was the same mythical ring 
as that of Minos, which in the poem of Bacchylides 
Theseus sought in the halls of Amphitrite ; its 
recovery was fatal to the ruler of the seas.^ 

Herodotus is the Homer of this later form of 
historical myths, in which the supernatural 
machinery consisted of oracles or significant 
dreams or marvellous coincidences. They corre- 
sponded to his wavering standard of the credible 
and probable, which generally excluded what 
seemed physically impossible. For instance, he 
positively refuses to believe that statues assumed 
a sitting posture.^ He duly records the story that 
a certain man dived under water a distance of 
several miles. It was the private opinion of 
Herodotus that that man arrived in a boat.^ 

^ S. Reinach, " Xerxes et rHellespont," in the Revue arcMoloffique, s^r. 
4, vol. vi. pp. 1 sqq., 1905. The symboUc marriage of the Doges of Venice 
with the Hadriatic is the same story, and Reinach also finds the same 
motif underlying the story of Xerxes and the Hellespont (Herod, vii. 35) 
and the rite practised by the Phocaeans, ib. i. 165, and by the lonians, 
Aristotle, 'A0. x. 23. 

2 V. 86. 3 viii. 8. 



II HERODOTUS 59 

Perhaps the story of the miraculous deliverance of 
Delphi from the Persians ^ may be taken to illustrate 
the ill -defined limits of his faith. Their oracle 
declared to the Delphian priests that the god would 
himself provide for the safety of his sanctuary, and 
when the Persians came they were repelled, with 
great havoc, by lightning and by the fall of huge 
boulders from Parnassus. Herodotus relates this 
without any hint of scepticism, though he em- 
phasizes the miraculous nature of the events. Now 
you observe that there is nothing impossible in the 
alleged physical occurrences ; the marvel lies in the 
opportunity of the coincidence and the fulfilment 
of the oracular announcement. Against a marvel 
of this order Herodotus had no prejudice. But 
another miracle was said to have happened on 
the same occasion. Certain sacred arms, which 
were preserved within the shrine and were too 
sacred to be profaned by human touch, were 
suddenly discovered lying in a heap in front of the 
temple. A rationalist — Euripides, for instance — 
would find no difficulty in such an occurrence, 
assuming the fact to be certain. Herodotus 
accepts it as a genuine marvel, without any 
suggestion that human agency, notwithstanding 
Delphic asseverations to the contrary, might have 
been concerned in the matter ; and the notable 
thing is that he considers it less wonderful than 
the intervention of the physical forces which over- 
whelmed the Persians. If such a phenomenon as 

1 viii. 36-39. 



60 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

the removal of the arms presented itself to us 
for criticism — supposing the fact were assured 
beyond a doubt, and supposing human agency 
were absolutely excluded by the circumstances — 
we should regard it as something incomparably 
more extraordinary than the unquestionably wonder- 
ful coincidence of the storm of lightning.^ Here, 
in fact, Herodotus has failed to draw the line at 
what is physically impossible. The truth is that 
his faith and doubt are alike instinctive ; he had 
never thought the problem out for himself; he 
had never clearly defined the border between the 
domains of the credible and the incredible. And 
so in this episode he has no sooner given us a 
lesson in faith than he relapses into reserve. For 
there was yet another marvel to be told. It was 
said that two armed warriors of superhuman 
stature pursued the flying Persians and dealt death 
among their broken ranks. But Herodotus care- 
fully avoids the responsibility of accepting this 
story. He gives it on the authority of the 
Persians ; he qualifies it by the phrase " as I 
am informed " ; and he adds that the Delphians 
identified the two warriors with local heroes. 

The contrast of the naivete of Herodotus with 
his scepticism imparts to his epic a very piquant 
quality. Credulity alternates with a cautious re- 
serve, which is especially noticeable when he is 



^ I do not add the fall of the rocks ; for this might have been engineered. 
The rocks were shown to Herodotus in the temple of Athena Pronaia 
(ch. 39) ; this was just the sort of evidence which would impress him. 



II HERODOTUS 61 

aware of more than one version of an occurrence. 
He is an expert in the art of not committing 
himself. He says in one passage, " I am bound 
to state what is said, but I am not bound to 
beheve."^ Of the tale that Zalmoxis lived for 
three years in a subterranean chamber, he pro- 
fesses agnosticism ; " I do not disbelieve nor do I 
absolutely believe it."^ Occasionally he criticizes 
and rejects a story, for instance the charge against 
the Alcmaeonids of treachery at Marathon ; but 
his common practice is to state conflicting accounts 
and leave the matter there. This method, as it 
happens, is much more satisfactory to a modern 
critic than if Herodotus had selected one version, 
or had attempted to blend different versions to- 
gether. But it shows him in the light of a collector 
of historical material, and an accomplished artist in 
arranging and presenting it, rather than as what we 
mean by a historian, who considers it his business 
to sift the evidence, and decide, if possible, between 
conflicting accounts. 

We are often tempted to think of Herodotus as 
an Ionian, although he was not a native of Ionia. 
He wrote in Ionic ; and he cannot be severed from 
the school of the Ionian historians, to whom his 
work owed a great deal more than appears on the 
surface. But if he had heard himself described 
as an Ionian writer, he would have been vastly 
indignant. He is at great pains to dissociate 
himself from Ionia and Ionian interests. In his 



62 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

account of the Ionian revolt and of the part which 
the lonians played in the war with Xerxes, he 
shows a hardly veiled contempt for a people which, 
as he says, had been thrice enslaved. He tells us 
that the name " Ionian was one of no great repute." 
He is careful to record, without any comment, the 
Scythian opinion that the lonians were the most 
cowardly and unmanly people in the world. ^ He 
takes frequent opportunities of criticizing adversely 
the views of Ionian writers. Now I think we may 
say that this antagonistic attitude was not due 
entirely or principally to the fact that he belonged 
by birth to Dorian Halicarnassus. He does indeed 
insist on the difference of Dorian and Ionian, but the 
contrast on which his anti-Ionian feeling depended 
was one within the Ionian race itself — the distinction 
of the Athenians from the lonians of Asia. We saw 
that Herodotus was at Athens before he went to 
Italy, and his connexion with Athens impressed its 
mark on his political views. He was a warm 
admirer of the Athenians, and looked with favour 
and enthusiasm on their empire. He participated 
in their experiment of colonising Thurii, became a 
citizen of their daughter-city. But even if we had 
not this external proof of his political sympathy, 
his work testifies to it abundantly. The whole 
account not only of the Marathonian campaign but 
of the war with Xerxes is one that redounds to the 
glory of Athens and flatters Athenian pride. It is, 
in fact, written mainly from the Athenian point of 

1 iv. 142. 



II HERODOTUS 63 

view, and represents largely, though not exclusively, 
the Athenian version. The Spartans and the part 
they took in the war are often handled with irony 
— for example, they were always arriving too 
late because they were celebrating a feast. The 
Corinthians are treated almost with malice. The 
story would have had a very different complexion 
if it had been written in the Spartan interest ; and 
even though we have no philo- Spartan historian of 
the time, a very good case has been made out for 
the view that Sparta showed as true heroism as 
i^thens.^ Further, Herodotus takes opportunities 
to set forth the mythistorical claims of Athens to 
a hegemony of the Greeks, and represents Athens 
as asserting those claims at the time of the Persian 
war.^ This is an anachronism. At that time 
Sparta was admittedly the leader and dictator ; 
Athens was a member of the Peloponnesian con- 
federacy, and the strife for supremacy had not 
beo^un. Thus the situation is construed in the 
light of the sequel ; history is distorted in the 
interest of politics ; and the grounds of the claim 
to hegemony which Herodotus ascribes to the 
Athenians of that time are the stock arguments 
which we find used in Athenian funeral orations to 
illustrate and justify the Athenian empire. In 
the Epitaphios which Pericles pronounced over the 
citizens killed in the Samian war (439 B.C.) these 
arguments from myth and history were doubtless 
marshalled ; and that Herodotus was present and 

1 By E. Meyer. 2 y^^ igl ; ix. 27. 



64 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

listened to it is a conjecture of Eduard Meyer, 
which has some plausibility, since we find that a 
famous picturesque phrase used by the orator, 
likening the dead soldiers to the spring taken out 
of tlie year, was adopted by the historian and 
placed in a new setting.^ 

Admiration for the Athenian empire in the 
third quarter of the fifth century meant admiration 
for Pericles, the chief inspirer of Athenian policy, 
and the sympathy of Herodotus with Pericles is 
revealed in the single passage in which he mentions 
him, where he records the anecdote of his mother's 
dream that a lion would be born to her.^ It is 
revealed, too, in sympathy with the Alcmaeonid 
family.^ 

His strong phil- Athenian feelings cannot be 
disconnected from his tone of prejudice and dis- 
paragement in treating the lonians. When the 
immediate danger of Persian subjection was over, 
and the Ionian cities which had been leagued with 
Athens as an equal were brought to submit to 
her as a mistress, there was little love lost. The 
Ionian record of the war was one which would 
have failed to satisfy Athenian patriots as certainly 

1 vii. 162. 2 yi 121^ 

^ V. 71 rests on the Alcmaeonid tradition. It has been suggested 
that this sympathy of Herodotus may explain his curious treatment of 
Themistocles. To this statesman Athens chiefly owed the decisive role 
she played in the war, and though his good counsels are recognised, he is 
also treated in an unfriendly spirit of detraction, and represented as an 
intriguer rather than as a statesman. This looks as if the memory of 
Themistocles were under a cloud, and this partial obscuration were 
reflected in Herodotus. Afterwards, Thucydides made a point of doing 
him justice. 



n HERODOTUS 65 

as the Herodotean narrative must have failed to 
please the lonians. Herodotus expressly argued 
that the Athenians were "truly the saviours of 
Greece " ; ^ but he did more : he gave currency and 
authority to a story which embodied Athenian 
tradition and justified Athenian empire, and with 
such cunning and tact that it has been permanently 
effective. His admiration for Athens was bound 
up with his belief in democratic freedom. Until 
the Peisistratids were overthrown, he says, Athens 
was an ordinary undistinguished city ; but when 
the Athenians abolished the tyranny and won their 
freedom, they became by far the first state in 
Greece.^ 

Herodotus then was a phil- Athenian democrat. 
If the story is true that the Athenians bestowed 
on him ten talents (about 12,000 dollars) in recog- 
nition of the merits of his work, it was a small 
remuneration for the service he rendered to the 
renown of their city.^ But that he did this service 
does not degrade his work into anything that 
could be described as a partisan publication in the 
offensive sense. It was pragmatical ; it reflected 
the author's political beliefs, and exhibited a strong 
bias in the preference given to Athenian sources. 
But it was the work of a historian who cannot help 
being partial ; it was not the work of a partisan 
who becomes a historian for the sake of his cause. 

1 vii. 139. 2 ^a«-/)45 irpuroi, v. 78. 

^ Plutarch, Hepl rfjs 'B.poddrov KaKoridelas, 26. There is nothing incred- 
ible in the story that he recited part of his work at Athens c. 445 b.c. 
His work then consisted of the last three Books. 



66 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

Something more particular must be said about 
the Herodotean story of the Persian invasion. A 
self- flattering version of the war had become a 
tradition at Athens. We have an early sketch of 
it, in a poetical form, in the Persae of Aeschylus 
(472 B.C.) ; but Herodotus was probably the first 
to write it down in a historical form, some twenty 
years later. Oral traditions (gathered at Athens, 
Sparta, Delphi, and elsewhere) appear profusely in 
his work, as every one knows. But he could not 
have constructed his history of the course of the 
war from oral traditions alone, or composed such 
a narrative of events, in which he was too young 
to take part, thirty years or so afterwards, without 
the help of some earlier record. We have seen 
that he depended on Hecataeus for Egypt, though 
this was just one of the portions of his work where 
autopsy, and information collected orally, might 
have sufficed. There is little doubt that Hecataeus 
was his main guide for early oriental history, and 
that the same writer was also used for the descrip- 
tions of Scythia and Libya, along with other 
geographical works of the Ionian school. When 
we come to the invasion of Darius and Xerxes, we 
find, as we might expect, clear indications that 
Herodotus here too had a written guide. Through- 
out the narrative, in the last three Books, of the 
events after Marathon to the end of the second 
invasion, the historian has naturally to pass back- 
wards and forwards from the Persians to the 
Greeks. Now there is a remarkable contrast 



n HERODOTUS 67 

between the character of the narrative when the 
writer takes us to Susa or to the Persian camp, 
and when he transports us to the cities or tents of 
the Greeks. In the accounts of what the Greeks 
did, we are constantly confronted with more than 
one story, representing various oral traditions which 
reflect different local interests. But when we 
follow the movements of the Persians, we have a 
continuous chronological narrative, by no means 
always credible, but all of a piece and marked by 
enumerations and details which point to a more or 
less contemporary written source, and a source of 
which Persian, not Greek, history was formally the 
subject. This source contributes the main thread 
of the narrative, round which Herodotus has 
wrought all the additional supplementary and 
illustrative material he managed to collect. The 
chronology of Persian events after Marathon is 
orderly and distinct, contrasting with the un- 
certainties which beset the digressions on Greek 
history, such as that on the Spartan kings 
Cleomenes and Demaratus. Now we know of a 
history of the Persian war prior to Herodotus, 
the book of Dionysius of Miletus. I spoke of 
it in the last lecture, and I also pointed out 
that the Persian history of Charon of Lamp- 
sacus may, not improbably, have come down 
to the invasion of Xerxes. Either of these 
books would satisfy the condition that the 
war was treated as an episode in Persian, 
not Greek, history, so that it is not unlikely 



68 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

that one of these may have been the source of 
Herodotus.^ 

Into the warp thus furnished by an older writer 
is wrought a woof of Athenian tradition, varied 
here and there by tissue from other sources. And 
it is noteworthy how in the last three Books, com- 
prising the invasion of Xerxes, the imminence of 
a divine direction of human affairs is strongly 
accentuated. The sceptical tone is less apparent 
here than in other parts of the work. From the 
beginning of the seventh Book the dominant note 
is changed, at least this is the impression I receive ; 
the atmosphere becomes charged with a certain 
solemnity ; it is, I think we might say, rather 
Athenian than Ionian. Is this difference due 
to the influence of those Athenian dramas which 
had glorified the subject, the tragedies of Phry- 
nichus and Aeschylus ? 

The catastrophe which befals the Persian ex- 
pedition is not conceived as the work of jealous 
gods annoyed by the conspicuous wealth or success 
of mere mortals. It is rather a divine punishment 
of the insolence and rashness that are often born of 
prosperity. This is the Aeschylean doctrine : 

Zeus Tot KokcwTrj'i twv VTrepKOfJiTroiv ayav 
(^povqiJ-droyv eTrecmv eil^wos /Sapv?.^ 

1 So Lehmann-Haupt. There is little evidence for a source of this 
kind in the history of the years 500-490 b.c. = Books v. vi. Chronology 
is conspicuously absent, but the few dates we get suggest a Persian 
history as their source (Charon or Dionysius ?). See vi. 18, 42 ad init. , 43 
ad init. , 46 ad init. 

2 Persae 827. In Agam. 749, Aeschylus rejects the vulgar doctrine 
(iraXai^aros ev ^poroh yipwv \6yos) that wealth, inordinately increased, 
necessarily leads to unappeasable woe. 



n HERODOTUS 69 

Zeus is a judge who visits heavily 

All whose self-glorious spirit vaults too high. 

This Athenian influence in the last Books of 
Herodotus accords with my conjecture that Athens 
was his headquarters during a part of the ten years 
or so which elapsed between his banishment and 
his sailing for Italy. 

Herodotus then made a considerable use of 
older writers ^ — of whom he only names Hecataeus, 
and usually for the purpose of hinting something 
uncomplimentary. As the works of these writers 
have perished, it is very difficult to form a fair 
estimate of the achievements of Herodotus himself 
as a historical investigator — apart from his trans- 
cendent gifts a^ an artist and man of letters. His 
great service consisted probably in the collection 
of unwritten material concerning modern Greek 
history ; this floating matter he wrought with 
masterly skill into a framework of facts constructed 
by predecessors. His maxims of historical criticism 
may be set down as three : (1) Suspect superhuman 
and miraculous occurrences, which contradict 
ordinary experience. But this, in his application 

1 A complete library of Greek prose works on history would have 
been very small in 450 b.c, and it would not have been very much larger 
in 430 B.C. It is difficult to suppose that Herodotus would not have been 
acquainted with all the historical literature that had been pubhshed, or 
that the works of Dionysius and Charon could have escaped him. Besides 
Hecataeus the only historian to whom he refers is Scylax (iv. 44), but 
he mentions him as an explorer and not as an author, though obviously 
his brief account of the exploration is taken from the report of Scylax. 
Could he have failed to know the book of this Carian writer on Heracleides 
of Mylasa? It is remarkable that he ignores the part played by 
Heracleides of Artemisium (see Sosylus fragment, mentioned above, p. 25). 
Heracleides is mentioned v. 121. The geographical works of the lonians 
are referred to in iv. 36. 



70 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

of it, leaves a wide room for portents, and it does 
not cover oracles and dreams. (2) When you are 
confronted by conflicting evidence or differing 
versions of the same event, keep an open mind ; 
audi alteram partem. But this does not save him 
from a biassed acceptance of Athenian tradition. 
(3) Autopsy and first-hand oral information are 
superior to stories at second hand, whether written 
or oral.^ This tends to take the naive form, " I 
know, for I was there myself," and it placed the 
historian at the mercy of the vergers and guides in 
Egyptian temples. 

I may illustrate by a couple of examples how 
Herodotus was sometimes unfortunate in his in- 
formation gathered on the spot. When he visited 
Egypt he saw on the great Pyramid inscriptions 
which disappeared in the Middle Ages. Probably 
they were of religious import, appropriate to a 
royal tomb. But Herodotus tells us that they 
enumerated the sums of money which were ex- 
pended on the onions and leeks consumed by the 
workmen who built the pyramid. This was the 
interpretation with which the guide satisfied the 
Greek traveller's curiosity.^ The other instance 

^ Compare, e.g., ii. 99. I have little doubt that Herodotus visited and 
examined the battlefield of Plataea. Our difficulties in reconstructing 
the battle (elucidated by Grundy, Woodhouse, and Macan) from his 
description are not an objection. We may remember that the account of 
the battle of Trasimene by Polybius, who had visited the place and was 
a master of military science, lends itself to diiFerent interpretations. 
The features of the Pass of Thermopylae as described by Herodotus 
can be recognised by any traveller to-day ; but he can hardly have been 
there, for he orients it N.S. instead of E.W. 

^ See Wiedemann, ad Her. ii. 125. 



n HERODOTUS 71 

I will quote appertains to Babylonian history. 
Herodotus saw at Babylon the great buildings of a 
king, with whose name even those of us who have 
not studied Babylonian annals are probably familiar 
— King Nebuchadnezzar. He is correctly informed 
as to the time at which they were built — five genera- 
tions after the reign of Queen Sammuramat whom 
he calls Semiramis. But autopsy did not keep him 
from falling into a droll error about the potentate 
who built them. Nebuchadnezzar has had rather 
bad luck. In the book of Daniel he is meta- 
morphosed into a beast of the field ; in Herodotus 
he is forced to masquerade as a woman. We have 
to discover his identity under the mask of Queen 
Nitocris.^ 

We must give full credit to Herodotus for 
having recognised the principles of criticism which 
I have indicated, though his application of them is 
unsatisfactory and sporadic. They are maxims of 
permanent validity ; properly qualified they lie at 
the basis of the modern developments of what 
is called historical methodology. But notwith- 
standing the profession of these axioms of common 
sense, he was in certain ways so lacking in 
common sense that parts of his work might seem 
to have been written by a precocious child. He 
undertook to write the history of a great war ; but 
he did not possess the most elementary knowledge 
of the conditions of warfare. His fantastic state- 

^ This has been shown by Lehmann-Haupt in his paper on Semiramis 
(see Bibliography). Herodotus is similarly unlucky about Mithra. He 
makes him a goddess, i. 131. 



72 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

ment of the impossible numbers of the army of 
Xerxes exhibits an incompetence which is ahuost 
incredible and is alone enough to stamp Herodotus 
as more of an epic poet than a historian. It 
matters not whether he worked out the arithmetic 
for himself or accepted it entirely on authority; 
this is a case in which to accept is as heinous as to 
invent. Heinous for a historian ; and if we judge 
Herodotus by the lowest standard as a historian of 
a war, this case invalidates his claim to competence. 
But as an epic story-teller he escapes triumphantly. 
His catalogue of the Persian host is a counterpart 
to the Catalogue of the Iliad: 

fivOov S' (OS OT aotSbs €7rto-Ta^eva)S KareXe^as. 

His incompetence in military matters is shown, in 
another way, in his account of the campaign of 
Thermopylae and Artemisium. The key to their 
actions lay — and it required no technical training 
or experience to discern this — in the close con- 
nexion and interdependence of the Persian land 
army and the Persian fleet, a fact which governed 
the Greek measures for defence. Herodotus, 
though he mentions several things which imply 
this and enable us more or less to penetrate the 
strategy of the combatants, fails completely to 
realise the situation and treats the naval and the 
land operations as if they were independent. 

In his relation of the Persian war, Herodotus 
does not neglect the chronology, and it is perhaps 
as satisfactory as we could expect. But it may 



11 HERODOTUS 73 

fairly be questioned whether the credit for this is 
not to be imputed to an earlier writer — Dionysius 
or Charon — whom he had the discretion to follow. 
It is significant that he does not give any formal 
date which a Greek reader could easily interpret, 
until he mentions, almost by the way, that the 
Persian invasion of Attica occurred in the archon- 
ship of Calliades.^ But while chronology fares 
pretty well in the last three Books, the whole work 
shows that, while the author copied the dates which 
his sources supplied, he never attempted to grapple 
with the chronological difficulties of Greek history, 
although so many of the episodes which he related 
raised the problem of synchronizing Hellenic tradi- 
tion with oriental records. We have no reason to 
suppose that he avoided the problem because he 
judged it insoluble ; his indifference to it is another 
manifestation of his epic, quasi-historical mind. 

The first phase of Greek historiography culmi- 
nates and achieves its glory in Herodotus. He 
reflects its features — its eager research into geo- 
graphy and ethnography (the indispensable ground- 
work of history), and its predominant interest in 
the East. He adopts from Hecataeus a critical 
attitude towards the ancient myths, aided by a 
rudimentary comparative mythology. But these 

^ He signalises the years 490-481 by reference to the year of Marathon, 
but he does not mention the eponymous archon of that year. Even if he 
had done so a reader would have required a list of Attic archon s, in order 
to follow his dates intelligently. Herodotus does not assist his readers 
by reckoning back from a fixed point which they could realise. Thucydides 
saw that without such a point dates were entirely in the air, and he dated 
backward from the first year of the Peloponnesian war. 



74 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect.ii 

elements are transfigured by the magic of his epic 
art and the spell of a higher historical idea. He 
was the Homer of the Persian war, and that war 
originally inspired him. His work presents a 
picture of sixth - century civilisation ; and it is 
also a universal history in so far as it gathers the 
greater part of the known world into a narrative 
which is concentrated upon a single issue. It is 
fortunate for literature that he was not too critical ; 
if his criticism had been more penetrating and less 
naive, he could not have been a second Homer. He 
belonged entirely in temper and mentality to the 
period before the sophistic illumination, which he 
lived to see but not to understand. Before his 
death, the first truly critical historian of the world 
had begun to compose. Our attention will next 
be claimed by Thucydides. 



LECTURE III 



THUCYDIDES 



§ 1. His life and the growth of his work 

Thucydides belonged by descent to the princely 
family of Thrace into which Miltiades, the hero 
of Marathon, had married. He was thus a cousin 
of the statesman Cimon, and he inherited a rich 
estate with gold mines in Thrace. And so, while 
he was an Athenian citizen and connected with a 
distinguished family of Athens, he had an inde- 
pendent pied a terre in a foreign country. His 
mind was moulded under the influence of that 
intellectual revolution which we associate with 
the comprehensive name of the Sophists, the 
illumination which was flooding the educated 
world of Hellas with the radiance of reason. 
Without accepting the positive doctrines of any 
particular teacher, he learned the greatest lesson 
of these thinkers : he learned to consider and 
criticize facts, unprejudiced by authority and 
tradition. He came to be at home in the 
"modern" way of thinking, which analysed 
politics and ethics, and applied logic to every- 
75 



76 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

thing in the world. We might illustrate how 
intense and deep -reaching the sophistic move- 
ment was, in the third quarter of the fifth century, 
by pointing to the difference between Herodotus 
and Thucydides. If you took up the two works 
without knowing the dates of their composition, 
you would think there might be a hundred years' 
development between them. But then consider 
the difference between Sophocles and Euripides. 

Thucydides must have been at least twenty-five 
years old, some think he was as much as forty, 
when the Peloponnesian war broke out in 431 
B.C. At the very beginning he formed the 
resolution to record it, and in the first years of 
the war, at least, the composition of the history 
was nearly contemporary with the events. In 
424 B.C. he was elected to the high office of a 
strategos and appointed to command in Thrace ; 
and the loss of Amphipolis led to his condemna- 
tion and banishment. For twenty years he did 
not see Athens, and, while he probably lived for 
the most part on his Thracian estate, he also 
travelled to collect material for his work. It 
seems certain that he visited Sicily, for his 
narrative of the Athenian expedition could not 
have been written by one who had not seen 
Syracuse with his own eyes.^ After the end of 
the war he was allowed to return to Athens in 
404 B.C. (by the decree of Oenobius). He did not 

^ That he knew Sparta is a legitimate inference from i. 10. 2, and 
134. 4. 



Ill THUCYDIDES 77 

die before 399 B.C. ; perhaps he was no longer 
alive in 396 B.C. ; and he left his book unfinished.^ 

It is evident how these biographical facts, and 
they are almost all we know about the man, bear 
upon his historical work. His family connexion 
at Athens provided him, perhaps, with exceptional 
facilities for obtaining authentic information, while 
his military training and experience qualified him 
to be the historian of a war. His second home in 
Thrace gave him an interest independent of 
Athens, and helped him to regard the Athenian 
empire with a certain detachment which would 
have been less easy for one who was a pure- 
blooded citizen and had no home outside Attica. 
His banishment operated in the same direction, 
and afforded him opportunities for intercourse 
with the antagonists of his country. The in- 
tellectual movement which invaded Athens when 
he was a young man was a condition of his mental 
growth ; if he had belonged to an earlier genera- 
tion, he could not have been Thucydides. 

But if all these circumstances helped and con- 
ditioned the achievements of a profoundly original 
mind, which always thought for itself, we must 
seek the stimulus which aroused the historical 
faculty of Thucydides in — the Athenian empire. 
If it was the wonder of the Greek repulse of the 
Persian hosts that inspired the epic spirit of 

^ There were conflicting stories as to the manner and the place of his 
death. His tomb, which may have been a cenotaph, was shown at 
Athens, in the burying-place of the family of his kinsman Cimon, near 
the Mehtid gate. 



78 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

Herodotus, it was the phenomenon of the Empire 
of Athens, a new thing in the history of Hellas, — 
an empire governed by a democracy, a new thing 
in the history of the world — that captured the 
cooler but intense interest of Thucydides. He 
did not take up his pen to celebrate ; his aim was 
to understand, — to observe critically how that 
empire behaved in the struggle which was to test 
its powers. It has not, I think, been sufficiently 
realised what an original stroke of genius it was 
to form the idea of recording the history of the 
war at the very moment of its outbreak. Con- 
temporary history in the strictest meaning of the 
term was thus initiated. Thucydides watched 
the events for the purpose of recording them ; 
he collected the material while it was fresh from 
the making. Further, he designed a history which 
should be simply a history of the war and of the 
relations of the militant states, which should con- 
fine itself to its theme, and not deviate into 
geography or anthropology or other things. Thus 
he was the founder of "political" history in the 
special sense in which we are accustomed to use 
the term. 

Widely divergent views are held as to the way 
in which the work of Thucydides was constructed 
and the stages by which it reached its final though 
incomplete state. This question is not one of 
merely meritorious curiosity which may be left 
to the commentator as his exclusive concern ; it 
affects our general conception of the historian's 



Ill THUCYDIDES 79 

point of view, as well as his art, and no study of 
Thucydides can evade it. 

The history falls into two parts. The first ends 
with the Fifty Years' Peace of 421 B.C., which at 
the time seemed to conclude the war and terminate 
the author's task. The second part is formally 
introduced by a personal explanation, in which 
Thucydides announces the continuation of his 
subject down to the capture of Athens in 404 B.C. 
He explains that though we may divide the whole 
period 431-404 B.C. into three parts — the first war 
of ten years, then seven years of hollow truce, and 
then a second war, — the truer view is that there 
was only one war lasting twenty-seven years, for 
the hollow truce was truly nothing less than war. 
This passage was written after 404 B.C. and natur- 
ally suggests that Thucydides had only recently 
recognised that the indecisive war which he had 
recorded was only a portion of a greater and 
decisive war, and had determined to extend the 
compass of his work to the whole twenty-seven 
years. On the other hand, his statements^ seem 
to make it evident that during his banishment he 
had followed the course of events and travelled 
with a view to continuing his work. This con- 
tinuation was prompted by the Athenian expedi- 
tion to Sicily, and was intended to be the history 
of what then seemed to him a second war. I 
conclude then that there were three stages in his 
plan. After the Fifty Years' Peace of 421 b.c., 

1 V. 26. 



80 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

his book was to be simply a history of the war 
of ten years. The course of the Sicilian expedi- 
tion began a new war which he determined also 
to record, as a chronologically separate episode. 
Then the catastrophe of 404 b.c. set in a new 
light the significance of all that had happened 
since the original outbreak of hostilities in 431 B.C., 
and imparted to the whole series of events a unity 
of meaning which they would hardly have acquired 
if the struggle had been terminated in 404 B.C. not 
by the fall of Athens but by a second edition of 
the Fifty Years' Peace. Hence Thucydides rose 
to the larger conception of producing a history of 
the whole period of twenty-seven years. 

Accordingly he found on his return to Athens 
that he had three things to do. He had to 
compose the history of the ambiguous interval 
between the Fifty Years' Peace and the Sicilian 
war. Secondly, he had to work up the rough 
copy and material of the last ten years. This was 
done^ fully and triumphantly for the Sicilian 
episode, but of the rest we only possess the un- 
revised draft of the years 412 and 411, known as 
Book VIII., for which, perhaps in respect to its 
literary shape, and certainly in respect to its 
matter (by means of supplementary information 
procurable at Athens), much had to be done. 
In the third place, it was desirable and even 
necessary to make some additions and alterations 
in the original, completed but still unpublished, 

^ Perhaps before his return. 



Ill THUCYDIDES 81 

history of the first ten years, so as to bring it 
internally as well as externally into the light of the 
higher unity. This was a natural thought, and it 
appears to me the only hypothesis that explains 
the facts without constraint.^ 



§2. His principles of histoiiography : accuracy 
and relevance 

In his Introduction Thucydides announces a 
new conception of historical writing. He sets up 
a new standard of truth or accurate reproduction 
of facts, and a new ideal of historical research ; 
judged by which, he finds Herodotus and the 
Ionian historians wanting. He condemns them 
expressly for aiming at providing "good read- 
ing," as we should say, rather than facts, and 
for narrating stories, the truth of which cannot 
possibly be tested. He does not seek himself to 
furnish entertainment or to win a popular success, 
but to construct a record which shall be per- 
manently valuable ^ because it is true. He warns 
his readers that they will find nothing mythical 
in his work. He saw, as we see, that the 
mythical element pervaded Herodotus (of whom, 
evidently, he was chiefly thinking) no less than 
Homer. His own experience in ascertaining 
contemporary facts taught him, as nothing else 
could do, how soon and how easily events are 

^ See Appendix. 

2 Instructive. I revert to this important point in Lecture VIII. 



82 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

wont to pass into the borders of myth ; he learned 
thereby the most effective lesson of scepticism in 
regard to historical tradition. It was indeed of 
inestimable importance for the future of history 
that Thucydides conceived the new idea of re- 
cording the war at its commencement. It made 
all the difference to his work that he formed the 
resolve in 431 B.C. and not after the war was over. 
Writing the history of the present is always a 
very different thing from writing the history of 
the distant past. The history of the distant past 
depends entirely on literary and documentary 
sources ; the history of the present always involves 
unwritten material as well as documents. But the 
difference was much greater in the days of 
Thucydides than it is now. To-day a writer 
sitting down to compose a history of his own 
time would depend mainly on written material, 
— on official reports, official documents of various 
kinds, and on the daily press. He would supple- 
ment this, so far as he could, by information 
derived personally from men of affairs, or by his 
own experience if he had witnessed or taken part 
in public events ; but the main body of his work 
would depend on written sources. The ancient 
historian, on the contrary, in consequence of the 
comparative paucity of official reports and the 
absence of our modern organization for collecting 
and circulating news, would have to be his own 
journalist and do all the labour of obtaining 
facts orally from the most likely sources ; and 



Ill THUCYDIDES 83 

his success might largely depend on accidental 
facilities. His work would rest mainly on in- 
formation obtained orally by his own inquiries, 
supplemented by such documents as were avail- 
able, such as the texts of treaties or official 
instructions or letters ; whereas the modern work 
is based principally on printed or written informa- 
tion, supplemented by such private information as 
may be accessible. It is clear that the ancient 
conditions made the historian's task more difficult, 
and demanded from him greater energy and 
initiative. Few things would be more interesting 
than a literary diary of Thucydides, telling of his 
interviews with his informants and showing his 
ways of collecting and sifting his material. But 
it was part of his artistic method to cover up all 
the traces of his procedure, in his finished narrative. 
He had to compare and criticize the various 
accounts he received of each transaction ; but his 
literary art required that he should present the 
final conclusions of his research without indicating 
divergences of evidence. It is probable that he 
suppressed entirely details about which he could 
not satisfy himself He was very chary of 
mentioning reports or allegations concerning which 
he felt in doubt ; in the few cases in which he 
disclaims certainty we may suppose that he 
accepted the statement as probable.^ He does 
not name his informants ; nor does he even tell 

^ For instance : of the answer of the oracle to the Spartans (ujj 
\4y€Tai), i. 118. 3 ; of the motives of Archidamus, ii. 18. 5 ; of the end of 
Nicias, vii. 86. 



84 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

us on what occasions he was himself an eye-witness 
of what he describes. We may make guesses, 
but we can only speak with assurance of the 
operations which he conducted as strategos. 

We are able, however, to gain a slight glimpse 
into the historian's workshop because some parts 
of his work have been left incomplete. The 
eighth Book is only a preliminary draft. In it 
we find accounts emanating from different inform- 
ants, Athenian and Peloponnesian, written out so 
as to form a continuous narrative, yet containing 
contradictions as to matters of fact as well as differ- 
ences in tendency.^ It is possible, for instance, to 
detect that some of the Peloponnesian informants 
were favourable to Astyochus the Lacedaemonian 
commander, and others were not. It is evident 
that we have material which has only been pro- 
visionally sifted. Again, the texts of the three 
successive treaties of alliance between Persia and 
Sparta are given verbatim,'^ and if we consider the 
transitory significance of the first two, it seems 
improbable that Thucydides intended to reproduce 
them in extenso in his final draft. They were 
material — material, according to a plausible con- 
jecture, furnished by Alcibiades. These facts, and 
the unsatisfactory nature of the account of the 
oligarchic revolution, as compared with the finished 
portions of the work, confirm what the style and 
the absence of speeches had long ago suggested, 

1 See Holzapfel's article mentioned in the Bibliography. 
2 viii. 18, 37, 58. 



m THUCYDIDES 85 

that Book viii. was a first draft which, if the 
writer had lived, would have appeared in a very 
different shape. 

In the fifth Book it may also be shown that 
there was still revision to be done, though this 
section was in a more advanced state than Book 
VIII. Here we find a whole series of documentary 
texts. Now it was not in accordance with the 
artistic method of Thucydides, or of ancient his- 
torians in general, to introduce into the narrative 
matter heterogeneous in style ; and it is almost 
incredible that he would have admitted texts not 
written in Attic Greek. We must, I think, con- 
clude that we have here material which was to be 
wrought in during a final revision. 

In the finished part of the history we can some- 
times penetrate to the source of information. It 
is easy to see that he consulted Plataeans as to the 
siege of Plataea, and that he received information 
from Spartans as well as from Athenians about 
the episode of Pylos and Sphacteria. We can 
sometimes divine that he has derived his state- 
ments from the official instructions given to military 
commanders ; and it has been acutely shown that 
his enumeration of the allies of the two opposing 
powers at the beginning of the war was based on 
the instrument of the Thirty Years' Peace.^ Some- 
times the formulae of decrees or treaties peer 
through the Thucydidean summary.^ 

^ By Wilamowitz-Mollendorff. 

2 Cp. ii. 24 ; iv. 16. Wilamowitz-Mollendorff, Die Thukydides-legende 
(see Bibliography). 



86 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

We have then to take the finished product, 
which Thucydides furnishes, on trust. We have 
not any considerable body of independent evidence 
for testing his accuracy, but so far as we can test 
it by the chance testimonies of original documents, 
he comes out triumphantly (in those parts which 
he completed), and there can be no question that 
the stress which he laid on accuracy was not a 
phrase.^ The serious criticisms which can be 
brought against him in regard to facts concern 
not what he states but what he omits to state. 
For instance, the important measure which Athens 
adopted in 424 B.C. of raising the tribute of the 
subject states is passed over entirely, though it is 
a pertinent fact in the story of the war ; we have 
learned it in recent years by the discovery of parts 
of the stone decree. We cannot discern his reasons 
for recounting some passages of military history at 
great length and passing over others (such as the 

1 Some errors are due not to the author but to very early scribes. For 
instance, Andocides in i. 51, Methone for Methana in iv. 45 (cp. Wila- 
mowitz-Mollendorff, op. cit.). It is unquestionable that he makes grave 
topographical mistakes in his account of the episode of Pylos-Sphacteria. 
He has completely misconceived the size of the entrances to the bay, and 
he gives the length of Sphacteria as 15 stades, whereas it is reaUy 24. 
These errors have led Grundy to deny that Thucydides had ever visited 
the spot ; while R. M. Burrows (who has shown that the whole narrative 
is otherwise in accordance with the topography) thinks that his measure- 
ments were wrong. My view is that he first vrrote the story from infor- 
mation supplied by eye-witnesses who gave him a general, though partly 
inaccurate, idea of the place, and that he afterwards tested it on the spot 
and probably added local touches, but omitted to revise the errors of 
distance. We have a somewhat similar case in the description of New Car- 
thage by Polybius (see below, p. 194). It is indeed possible that the blunder 
in the length of the island may have been exaggerated by a scribe's pen. 
For K was exposed to confusion with (tj or) te. — The topography of the 
siege of Plataea has been elucidated by Grundy. 



Ill THUCYDIDES 87 

attempt of Pericles on Epidaurus) with a bare 
mention. But in other cases his silence is a judg- 
ment. He rejects, for instance, by ignoring, the 
connexion which the gossip of the Athenian 
streets alleged between the private life of Pericles 
and the origin of the war. But it must be allowed 
in general that, in omitting, Thucydides displays a 
boldness and masterfulness on which no modern 
historian would venture.^ 

His omissions are closely connected with a 
general feature of his work. If the first funda- 
mental principle of his ideal of history was 
accuracy, the second was relevance ; and both 
signify his rebound from Herodotus. Discursive- 
ness as we saw was the very life-breath of the 
epic history of Herodotus ; the comprehensiveness 
of the Ionian idea of history enabled him to spread 
about through a wide range, to string on tale to 
tale, to pile digression on digression, artfully, yet 
as loosely as the structure of his Ionic prose. 
Thucydides conceived the notion of political 
history, and he laid down for himself a strict 
principle of exclusion. His subject is the war, 
and he will not take advantage of opportunities 
to digress into the history of culture. He ex- 
cludes geography, so far as brief notices are not 
immediately necessary for the explanation of the 



^ Thus no modern historian, probably, would have omitted to note the 
psephisma of Charinus, which foUowed up the decrees excluding Megara 
from the markets of Athens and her empire, by excluding Megarians 
on penalty of death from the very soil of Attica. Thucydides would have 
said that it did not affect the outbreak of the war. 



88 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

events recorded. He disdains personal gossip and 
anecdotes ; he had no use for the spicy memoirs of 
Ion and Stesimbrotus. He rigidly abstains from 
dropping any information about the private life of 
Pericles, Cleon, or any other politician ; and the 
exception which he makes in the case of Alcibiades 
only serves to show the reason for the rule ; because 
those sides of the life of Alcibiades which Thucy- 
dides notices had, in his view, distinct political 
consequences in determining the attitude of the 
Athenians towards him. Further, he excludes the 
internal history of the states with whose political 
inter-relations he is concerned, except when the 
internal affected directly, or was bound up with, 
the external, as in the case of the plague and of 
the domestic seditions. He does not give any 
information about the political parties at Athens, 
though some of his statements imply their exist- 
ence, till he comes to the oligarchical revolution. 
His outlook, as Wilamowitz has observed, is not 
bounded by the Pnyx, but by the Empire. 

There are, of course, digressions in Thucydides, 
but with hardly an exception they are either 
closely relevant or introduced for some special 
purpose. 

The history of the growth of the Athenian 
empire is in form an excursus; but we might 
fairly say that it properly belongs to the pro- 
legomena ; it is distinctly relevant to the subject 
of the book, and had the special purpose of supple- 
menting and correcting Hellanicus. The digression 



ni THUCYDIDES 89 

on the fortunes of Pausanias is also a relevant, 
though certainly not necessary, explanation of the 
Athenian demand that the Lacedaemonians should 
expel a pollution ; but the account, which follows, 
of the later career of Themistocles is wholly 
unconnected with the Peloponnesian war. I 
will however show hereafter that the author 
had a special motive in introducing it. The 
valuable chapter on early Athens, with its archaeo- 
logical evidence,^ is strictly to the point, for its 
purpose is to illustrate the historian's acute remark 
that the distress of the country people at coming 
to live in the city was due to habits derived from 
the early history of Attica. A sketch of the early 
history of Sicily was almost indispensable for the 
elucidation of the narrative ; a knowledge of the 
island and its cities could not be taken for granted 
in the Athenian public. The description of the 
Odrysean kingdom of Sitalces^ was unquestionably 
due to the author's personal interest in Thrace ; 
but it had the object of suggesting a contrast 
between the power and resources of Thrace and 
Scythia with those of the Greek states. 

The story of the fall of the Athenian tyrants 
(in Book vi.), which is an excursus in the true 
sense of the word, was introduced to correct popular 
errors. The other passage in which Thucydides 
seems for a moment non-Thucydidean is where 
he sketches the history of the fair of Delos, quotes 

^ A part of it would naturally have appeared in a footnote, had foot- 
notes been then in use. 
2 ii. 96-7 ; cp. ii. 29. 



90 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

from a Homeric hymn, and deviates into the 
history of culture. I cannot help suspecting that 
here too he is correcting some current misappre- 
hension. If he may legitimately be criticized for 
turning aside from his subject to correct errors 
which may seem trivial enough, and if he is some- 
times reprimanded for having elsewhere captiously 
noted a couple of small blunders in Herodotus, it 
must be remembered that it was of importance 
to illustrate his doctrine that tradition cannot be 
taken on trust, and that the facile methods of 
current historiography inevitably led to inaccuracy. 
The digressions then in Thucydides which can 
fairly be called digressions are different in character 
from the digressions and amplitudes of Herodotus. 
The critic Dionysius considered it a point of 
inferiority in Thucydides, as compared with Hero- 
dotus, that he pursued his subject steadily and 
kept to his argument, without pausing by the way 
and providing his readers with variety ; and he 
supposed that in " the two or three places " where 
the historian did digress, his motive was to relieve 
the narrative by a pleasant pause. The criticism 
would have been more elucidating if Dionysius had 
pointed out that, while Herodotus was influenced by 
the epic, the artistic method of Thucydides' must 
rather be compared with that of the drama. Thucy- 
dides adheres as closely to his argument as a tragic 
poet, and such variety as was secured in tragedy 
by the interjection of choral odes, he obtains by the 
speeches which he intersperses in the narrative. 



Ill THUCYDIDES 91 

His first consideration was accuracy ; he had to 
follow events and not to mould them into corre- 
spondence with an artistic plan, and his strict chrono- 
logical order excluded devices of arrangement. But 
occasionally we can detect deliberate management 
for the sake of a calculated effect. It may be 
pointed out that the long section on the origin and 
growth of the Athenian empire, placed where it 
is, between the two AssembUes at Sparta, has the 
effect of interrupting a series of speeches which 
coming together would have been excessively long. 
Again, it has been well shown by Wilamowitz- 
MoUendorff how the delays of Archidamus, in the 
first invasion of Attica, in the hope that Athens 
might give in at the last moment, are reflected in 
the form of the narrative, which is arranged to 
produce the impression of a slow and halting 
march; and the archaeological deviation into the 
early history of Athens has the value of assisting 
in this artistic effect. 

§ 3. Modern criticisms on his competence 

In common with other ancient historians, 
Thucydides may be taken to task for not having 
recognised the part played in human affairs by 
economic facts and commercial interests. That he 
was not blind to economic conditions is shown by 
the leading significance he attributes to want of 
material resources in the early Greek communities ; 
and he fully realises the importance of finance. 
But it may be said that he should have furnished a 



92 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

detailed explanation and analysis of the commercial 
basis on which the Athenian power rested, and of 
the mercantile interests of other states which were 
affected and endangered by her empire. It is 
however only in quite recent times that economical 
and commercial factors in historical develop- 
ment have begun to receive their due, and, 
perhaps it may be said, rather more than their 
due. They have come so much to the front that 
some writers are tempted to explain all historical 
phenomena by economic causes. This illustrates 
how the tendencies of the present react upon our 
conceptions of the past. These factors, of such 
immense importance in the present age, certainly 
did not play anything like the same part in the 
ancient world, and if the ancient historians con- 
siderably underrated them, we may easily fall into 
the error of overrating them. We may be sure 
that the interests of Athens presented themselves 
to statesmen, as to Thucydides, primarily under the 
political, and not the economical, point of view. 
Thucydides created political history ; economic 
history is a discovery of the nineteenth century. 

Perhaps the gravest accusation which has been 
brought against the competency of Thucydides is 
that he misunderstood, if he did not intentionally 
misrepresent, the causes of the Peloponnesian war. 
The charge has been formulated and pressed in 
different ways by a German and by an English 
scholar.^ Their indictments do not appear to me 

^ H. Nissen and F. M. Cornford. 



Ill THUCYDIDES 93 

to be successful. The historian's account, which 
can only be refuted by proofs of internal discrep- 
ancy or of insufficiency, seems to be both con- 
sistent and, with certain reserves, adequate. 

It will not be amiss to make a preliminary 
observation on two words which Thucydides 
uses in the sense of cause — alria and 7rp6^aai<i. 
alria has almost the same history as the Latin 
equivalent, caussa. Its proper sense was "griev- 
ance" or "ground of blame," "charge," and in 
Thucydides it generally^ either means this or, 
even when we can most appropriately translate it 
by cause, impUes a charge or imputation. Trpo- 
<l)a<TL<: is an alleged reason, which may be either 
true or false ; ultimately it became virtually 
restricted to a false or minor reason, and so 
equivalent to "pretext." In Thucydides it is 
not so restricted; he employs it in both ways. 
And from meaning an alleged reason, it is evident 
how easily it could come to mean a reason, 
whether alleged or not ; in other words, a 
"motive" or an "occasion," so that here it ap- 
proximated very closely to the sense of "cause." 
This various use of the word does not imply any con- 
fusion of thought ; we use the word " reason " with 
similar elasticity ; the context decides the sense. 

When a war breaks out, there are two things to 
be explained which must be kept distinct : why the 
aggressors go to war at all, and why they go to 
war at the time they actually do. This distinction 

1 But cp. iv. 87. 4. 



94 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

is crucial, for instance, in the case of the outbreak 
of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. In some 
cases, the answer to both questions is the same ; 
there may be no reason for the war, beyond the 
particular circumstances which lead immediately to 
its declaration. In the case of the Peloponnesian 
war, Thucydides is careful to insist that this was 
not so. There was a permanent motive for 
hostility, of such a kind that war, sooner or later, 
might be counted on as a certainty ; there were 
also particular transactions which determined its 
actual outbreak at a particular moment. When the 
Lacedaemonians took steps to break the peace, of 
course they did not mention the permanent and really 
impelling motive, namely, jealousy of Athenian 
aggrandisement, but rested their declaration on 
certain recent actions on the part of Athens. 
Thucydides puts it thus : " The true motive {irpo- 
(jjaai^), though it was not expressed in words, I 
consider to have been the fear which the growth of 
the Athenian power caused to the Lacedaemonians ; 
but the publicly alleged grounds of complaint 
{akiac) which provoked the war I will proceed to 
explain," and he enters upon the stories of Corcyra 
and Potidaea. Thucydides accepted the convic- 
tions expressed both by the Corcyraean ambassador 
in his speech at Athens and by Pericles that a war 
was unavoidable, and that it was merely a question 
how long it might be postponed ; and we certainly 
cannot prove that this judgment was wrong. 

The distinction then between the real motive 



Ill THUCYDIDES 95 

of the Lacedaemonians, in the absence of which 
they would not have declared war, and the par- 
ticular actions which brought matters to a head and 
determined the beginning of a war at a certain 
date, is perfectly clear and valid. The further 
question can be raised, whether in his account of 
the affairs which moved the Peloponnesian alliance 
to hostile action at a given moment, Thucydides 
estimated rightly their proportional gravity. The 
charge is that he has not given its due importance 
to the Megarian business, whether failing to realise 
its meaning, or deliberately keeping it in the back- 
ground in order to devolve the responsibility for 
the war from the shoulders of Pericles who was 
responsible for the Megarian poHcy. The second 
insinuation I need not consider ; for I will show 
hereafter (in the next Lecture) that the historian's 
attitude to Pericles and his policy is detached. I 
will only observe here that if he had wished to 
shield that statesman from the alleged responsi- 
bility, it was clumsy of him not to suppress or 
explain away the fact that in the final negotia- 
tions the Lacedaemonians made Megara the test- 
question, and said they would be satisfied if Athens 
yielded on that point. 

This ultimatum of the Lacedaemonians may 
indeed appear, at first sight, inconsistent with the 
subordinate role which the Megarian grievance 
plays in the historian's narrative of the circum- 
stances which led to the war ; and it has been 
urged that instead of keeping it in the background 



96 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

he ought to have assigned it the most prominent 
place in the foreground. But a careful examina- 
tion will show, I think, that the narrative is com- 
pletely consistent, and embodies a closely reasoned 
account of the causes and motives at work. 

The most casual reader receives the unmistak- 
able impression that the Corinthians were the prime 
instigators of the war, driving the Lacedaemonians 
into action. The two affairs in which their interests 
were exclusively involved, the affair of Corcyra and 
the affair of Potidaea, are those which the author 
designates as the direct occasion of the war ; and 
the leading part taken by Corinth is emphasized 
by the reproduction of two Corinthian speeches, 
voicing Peloponnesian dissatisfaction. If the 
deepest concern of Corinth was the action which 
Athens had taken in regard to Megara by ex- 
cluding her from the markets of the Athenian 
empire, and thereby threatening her with eco- 
nomic ruin, then it must be allowed that Thucy- 
dides was entirely misinformed. In their speeches 
at Sparta, the Corinthian envoys do not mention 
the Megarian name, and the author expressly states 
that their eagerness to have war declared imme- 
diately was due to their anxiety for Potidaea. 
Can we discover any proof as to the real interest 
of Corinth in the Megarian question ? 

When the Corcyraean affair occurred, Corinth 
was so far from being anxious for war that she did 
all she could to secure the goodwill and neutrality 
of Athens. And she did not come with her hands 



in THUCYDIDES 97 

empty. She did not merely urge her claims on 
Athenian gratitude for past services. She pro- 
posed a deal (433 B.C.). Some time before this, 
Athens had already initiated new designs on 
Megara by a decree excluding Megarian wares 
from Athens itself. Corinth now said to her in 
effect : Leave us a free hand in dealing with 
Corey ra, and we will leave you a free hand in deal- 
ing with Megara, The Corinthian ambassador, 
put this diplomatically, at least in his speech 
before the popular Assembly.^ He did not say : 
You have improper designs on Megara, and we will 
connive. He said : Your conduct in regard to 
Megara has been open to suspicion ; you can allay 
these suspicions by doing what we ask. It came 
to the same thing. 

This proposition on the part of Corinth shows 
that in her eyes the independence of Megara was 
not of crucial importance. Her interests there 
weighed much less than her interests elsewhere. 
It was the alliance of Athens with Corcyra, fol- 
lowed by the affair of Potidaea, that determined 
the colHsion of Corinth with Athens, and it was 
this collision that precipitated a war which would 
in any case have come later. The Megarian 
decrees did not determine the action of Corinth, 
and it was Corinth's action which was decisive. 
On the other hand, once war was decided on by 
Corinth and the war-party at Sparta, the griev- 
ance of Megara formed an imposing item in the 

1 i. 42. 2. 

H 



98 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

list of Peloponnesian complaints and the general 
indictment of Athenian policy. In this indictment, 
the alliance of Athens with Corcyra, though it had 
been the first of the effective causes which led to 
the war, could not appear at all ; it could not be 
represented as either iUegal or immoral. The 
attack on Potidaea could form a count ; but it 
arose out of a complicated situation, and a great 
deal could be said on both sides. It was therefore 
an obvious stroke of diplomatic tactics to move the 
Megarian question into the foremost place, and 
represent the cruelty of Athens to Megara as the 
principal of her offences. The Lacedaemonians 
said : Yield on this question and there will be no 
war. It was a demand which no proud state, in 
the position of Athens, could have granted, and 
concession would have been simply an invitation 
for further commands. The reply was : We deny 
your right to dictate ; but we are perfectly willing 
to submit all your complaints to arbitration in 
accordance with the instrument of the Thirty 
Years' Peace. 

This is a perfectly consistent and intelligible 
account of the origin of the war ; is there any 
reason for supposing that it is not true ? The 
only positive evidence to which an appeal can be 
made for rejecting it is that of Aristophanes, who 
attributes the outbreak to the second JNIegarian 
decree. This was the natural, superficial view, on 
account of the prominence which had been given 
to that decree in the final negotiation ; and it is 



Ill THUCYDIDES 99 

not inconsistent with the Thucydidean account, in so 
far as that, if Athens had yielded, the war might 
have been avoided, or rather postponed. Further : 
in evahiating the statement of the comic poet, 
which doubtless reflected the current opinion of 
the Athenian market-place, we must not leave out 
of account the Athenian feeling against the war a 
year or so after it had broken out, a feeling which 
sought to lay the entire blame on Pericles and 
wove legends round the Megarian decree.^ But 
the popular opinion, expressed by Aristophanes, 
does not really contradict the causal perspective of 
Thucydides. It was precisely the notion which in 
the given circumstances was most likely to be left 
in the popular mind, if the occurrences were such 
as Thucydides represents them. 

There is another consideration which must not 
be neglected. Unless we hold the doctrine that all 
the speeches are entirely free inventions of his own, 
as purely Thucydidean throughout in argument as 
they are in style, — a doctrine which is untenable in 
face of his express statement, — and that he adapted 
the speeches of the first Book to a preconceived 
construction of his own, the speeches were a most 
important part of his material for forming his con- 
clusion as to the causes and motives of the war. 
He probably heard those delivered at Athens ; he 
was informed of the tenor or heads of those de- 

1 We do not know whether the Megarian business figured in the 
Dionysalexandros of Cratinus (430-29 b.c), which satirised Pericles as 
being the cause of the war. See the Argument of the play, recovered by 
Grenfell and Hunt, Oxyrhynchus Papyri, iv. No. 663. 



100 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

livered at Sparta ; and he has reproduced the drift 
of these important pieces of evidence. Both in 
what they say, and in what they do not say, they 
bear out the justice of his construction and his 
perspective. 

It is a distinct question, What were the guiding 
motives of the Athenian poUcy in regard to 
Megara? Thucydides does not consider it, be- 
cause it did not seem to him to have determined 
the outbreak of the war, and was therefore, in a 
narrow sense, irrelevant ; a modern historian would 
not venture to treat it in this way. The object of 
Athens was undoubtedly to recover control of the 
Megarid which she had in recent times won and 
lost ; and, to do this without violating the Thirty 
Years' Peace, she resorted to economical pressure 
which would starve her neighbour into voluntary 
submission. Megara had a double value. Her 
control would give Athens the power of blocking 
the land route between the Peloponnesus and 
Boeotia, and would also secure to her a direct 
access to the Corinthian Gulf, for her commerce 
or her troops.^ We cannot say which of these 
consequences of the geographical position of 
Megara counted more with Athenian statesmen, 
in their unarmed aggression against a neighbour 
with whom their relations had long been un- 

1 F. M. Cornford has ably explained the geographical importance of 
the Megarid as a commercial route between East and West, taking as his 
text what he calls Berard's " law of isthmuses " ; and those who do not 
accept his inferences as a criticism of Thucydides must recognise the 
value of his investigation. 



Ill THUCYDIDES 101 

friendly ; whether they were actuated rather by 
the "long view" of the use of a port on the 
Corinthian Gulf, for adding a western to their 
eastern empire, or by the more obvious view of 
erecting a barrier against the Peloponnesus. At 
Sparta, we may be sure, it was the second danger 
which would create more alarm. But however 
this may be, there is nothing to show that if there. 
had been no affair of Corcyra and no affair of 
Potidaea, the Megarian question by itself would 
have caused the outbreak of the war at the time. 

But the criticism to which Thucydides has been 
exposed illustrates the disadvantages of his method, 
when it is pressed too far. His principle is to 
mention only effective policies, and to mention 
them for the first time when they begin to 
become effective. If Megara was a pawn in 
Athenian schemes of aggrandisement in western 
Greece, it was never moved ; and in saying nothing 
of this aspect of the Megarian question, the 
historian is true to his method. If, in 433 B.C. 
or before, some Athenian politicians had their 
eyes on Sicily and Italy, the policy had no 
results till 427 e.g., and therefore in passing over 
with a bare mention the fact that Athens, in 
accepting the Corcyraean proposals in 433 B.C., 
recognised Italy and Sicily as within the range of 
her interests, he is again true to his method. 



102 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 



§ 4. His treatment of non-contemporary history 

Thucydides not only showed Greece how con- 
temporary history should be studied and recorded ; 
he also gave a specimen of a new way of handling 
the history of past ages. He prefixed to his work 
a general sketch of the history of Hellas which 
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who by no means 
appreciated its merits, justly described as equiva- 
lent to an independent work. This sketch is 
amazing in its power and insight. We must re- 
member that it is confined strictly to one side of 
the historical development. It is intended to 
answer a definite question : how it was that 
before quite recent times no large and powerful 
state had arisen in Greece ; and to explain the 
small scale of the military and political enter- 
prises of the past. It does not touch on con- 
stitutional history at all, and the "period of the 
tyrants " is only emphasized because their non- 
aggressive policy was a relevant point in the 
exposition. Within the limits to which it strictly 
adh'eres, this outline is a most closely reasoned 
argument and was the revelation of a totally new 
way of treating history. We cannot endorse it 
all ; and of the Homeric and pre-Homeric civilisa- 
tion in Greece we have come to know within the 
last thirty years more than Thucydides could 
discover. But criticism of details is not to the 
point ; his sketch remains a shining example of 



Ill THUCYDIDES 103 

sheer historical insight and grasp. Rising with 
easy mastery over the mass of legends and details 
which constituted the ill-ordered store of Greek 
tradition, he constructs a reasoned march of 
development, furnishing the proofs of his con- 
clusions. He draws broad lines of historical 
growth, elicits general and essential facts from 
the multitude of particulars, and characterizes 
periods by their salient features. He calls atten- 
tion to the importance of considering conditions 
of culture, and suggests the text for a history of 
Greek civilisation. He turns the daylight of 
material conditions on the mythical period, and 
discovers in the want of resources the key to 
certain sides of the development of Hellas. 

He accepts, of course, Uke Herodotus and every 
one else, the actual existence of heroes such as 
Pelops, Agamemnon, Minos, for whom the 
genealogies seemed to vouch.^ He did not 
question the fact of the Trojan war; but he 



1 He takes a matter-of-fact account of the establishment of the Pelopid 
dynasty in Argolis from some previous v/riter, i. 9. 2 Xeyovai d^ /cat ol 
TO. aa<pi(XTaTa HeXoirovvrjaiuv fJ'Vrj/J.y irapa tQv irpbrepov dedeypi&oi (where 
Il€\oTrovvr]<Ti(i3v depends on oi). A Peloponnesian on ancient Argive 
history suggests Acusilaus. We should expect a man interested in 
history hke Thucydides to have read aU or most of the historical works 
which then existed. The only particular works he mentions (besides 
Homer) are the avyypatpT^ 'Attlkt) of Hellanicus and the Apology of 
Antiphon ; but he refers generally to the works of poets and prose 
writers {Xoyoypdcpoi, i. 21) on early Greece, and of prose writers he was 
here thinking chiefly of Herodotus, whom he admittedly criticizes else- 
where. It has been conjectured with much probability that in writing 
the early chapters of Book vi. on the colonisation of Sicily he used the 
history of Antiochus of Syracuse (Wolfflin). He cannot have failed to 
know the books of Ion of Chios and Stesimbrotus, which must have been 
read with avidity at Athens. 



104 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

inferred that such a fact meant the eminence 
of a leading state in Greece at the time, and 
showed that an examination of the traditions 
about it pointed to a general lack of resources. 
He accepted Minos ; and his instinct in em- 
phasizing the Cretan thalassocracy seems to be 
justified by the recent discoveries in Crete. 
When he comes to a later time, he seizes with 
a sure eye as the greatest and most important 
fact of the two centuries before the Persian war 
the revival of nautical powers and the growth of 
navies. 

In his acute arguments he employs methods 
which may be called modern. For instance, he 
points to the culture of backward parts of Greece 
as a survival of a culture which at one time in 
the past prevailed generally. He quotes Homer 
as a witness for the conditions of his own age 
without any reserve ; but when he quotes him 
in evidence for facts about the Trojan war, he 
adds a clause of caution. His proof of a Carian 
population in the islands is not literary but 
archaeological — Carian tombs which were dis- 
covered in his own day when Delos was purified. 

The outline of the growth of the Athenian 
empire after the Persian wars is an exercise of a 
different kind. No history of this period existed 
except what was furnished by the brief chronicle 
of Hellanicus. The account of Thucydides is an 
original contribution and embodies the results of 
his own inquiries. He comments on the work 



Ill THUCYDIDES 105 

of Hellanicus, noticing its inadequacy and alleging 
that it was chronologically inaccurate. Hellanicus, 
as we saw, found a place for every event in an 
archon year, and I gave an instance of the errors 
into which he fell through pretending to know 
too much. Thucydides gives no absolute dates 
and very few chronological indications of any 
kind. It looks at first sight as if Hellanicus 
might have retorted on Thucydides that he had 
a curious notion of chronological precision. But 
the point of the Thucydidean criticism was just 
this, that there were no certain or sufficient data 
for such precision, and that the chronological 
exactness of Hellanicus was an illusion. We 
may suspect further that in the order in which 
he placed some of the events, he corrected 
his predecessor. How far his corrections, for 
which he must have relied on the memories of 
older men, were right, we cannot say. But in 
any case, here too, he gave his contemporaries 
a salutary lesson in scepticism. He pointedly 
abstains from referring at all to the archon 
years.^ In his view the archon years, which ran 
from July to July, were inconvenient and un- 
suitable for a chronicle of military events, and 

1 In the Pentekontaeteris, He is careful to mark the beginning of the 
Peloponnesian war (ii. 2) by the archon, the Spartan ephor, and the 
Argive priestess of Hera (this last dating, which he puts first, shows 
the influence of Hellanicus, which has also been conjectured in iv. 133). 
Similarly, when he starts afresh after the Ten Years' War, the date is 
marked by archon and ephor, v. 25. But we may legitimately criticize 
him for not having indicated formally the chronology of the four years 
(435-2) which are treated in Book i. A date is obviously wanted in 
c. 24. 



106 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect.ih 

liable to lead to serious inaccuracies. For this 
reason he based his own military history on the 
natural division of the year into summer and 
winter. That strict chronology was indispensable 
for accurate history, Thucydides was fully con- 
vinced. He proved it by casting his own work 
into the form of annals. He was an artist, and 
he could not have failed to see as clearly as his 
critics (like Dionysius of Halicarnassus) that the 
annalistic frame was an awkward impediment to 
any plan of artistic construction. The two claims 
of chronological accuracy and a pleasing literary 
arrangement are not irreconcilable, as other 
historians, like Gibbon, have shown ; but Thucy- 
dides did not attempt to combine them, and it 
was characteristic that he should have preferred 
the demand of historical precision to the exigencies 
of literary art. His artistic powers were displayed 
not in the architecture of his work, but in a 
certain dramatic mode of treatment which will 
be considered in the next lecture. 



LECTURE IV 

THUCYDiDES {continued) 

§ 1. The Speeches 

The historian has to do more than chronicle events. 
It is his business to show why things happened and 
to discover the forces which were at work. In 
order to understand the meaning of historical facts, 
he has to measure the characters and penetrate the 
motives of the actors, as well as to realise the con- 
ditions in which they acted. A psychological 
reconstruction is thus always involved in history, 
a reconstruction carried out in the mind of the 
individual historian, and necessarily affected by his 
personal temperament and his psychological ability. 
Some one has said that a writer who could draw a 
perfectly true and adequate portrait of Napoleon's 
complex character would be a man whose own soul 
was a counterpart of Napoleon's. This of course 
is an extreme way of putting the case, for there is 
such a thing as psychological imagination. But 
the subjective process can never be eliminated. It 
has different aspects in the cases of contemporary 
and non- contemporary historians. The contem- 
107 



108 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

porary historian lives in the same milieu, in the 
same sphere of ideas, and thus has more points of 
common sympathy with the political actors of his 
time ; but, on the other hand, he cannot generally 
avoid the bias of personal views of his own. The 
historian of a past epoch may hope to be more 
impartial, but he cannot hope to divest himself, 
beyond a certain point, of the standards and 
measures of his own age ; they are inwoven in 
the tissue of his mind and they must affect his 
attempts to reconstruct the past. 

Thucydides has concealed this inevitable sub- 
jective element by his dramatic method. The 
persons who play leading parts in the public affairs 
which he relates reveal their characters and person- 
alities, so far as is required, by their actions and 
speeches. The author, like a dramatist, remains 
in the background, only sometimes coming forward 
to introduce them with a description as brief as in 
a playbill, or to indicate what men thought about 
them or the impression they made on their con- 
temporaries. His rule is to commit himself to no 
personal judgments, and to this rule there are very 
few exceptions. 

The characters of some of the political personages 
are partly indicated in the speeches, of which I 
must now speak. They are an essential feature 
of the Thucydidean art. Herodotus had set the 
example, but Thucydides used speeches for different 
purposes and on a different scale, and adapted them 
to a different method. He states explicitly how 



IV THUCYDIDES 109 

the speeches are to be taken and what they repre- . 
sent. In some cases he heard speeches delivered, 
but it was impossible for him to remember them 
accurately ; and in other cases he had to depend on 
the oral reports of others. His general rule was 
to take the general drift and intention of the 
speaker, and from this text compose what he might 
probably have said. It is clear that this principle 
gave great latitude to the author, and that the 
resemblances of the Thucydidean speeches to those 
actually spoken must have varied widely according 
to his information. They are all distinctly Thucy- 
didean in style, just as the various characters in a 
play of Euripides all use similar diction. Homo- 
geneity in style was a canon of most ancient men 
of letters ; they shrank from introducing lengthy 
quotations or inserting the ipsissima verba of docu- 
ments. Occasionally Thucydides has probably 
indicated personal mannerisms. For instance, in a 
speech of Alcibiades there are one or two expressions 
which are intended to suggest his characteristically 
"forcible" style.^ But this has been done with 
great reserve. Thucydides in his portraiture does 
not depend on mannerisms. The speeches of 
Pericles produce the effect of the lofty earnestness 
of a patriotic statesman who is somewhat of an 
idealist ; the speech of Cleon is that of a bullying 
pedagogue. But the diction is the same. So in 
Aeschylus, the nurse maunders, though she speaks 

■^ vi. 18 oiJK ^(TTLv Tjfjuv TafueveffdaL is Haov /3ouX6^e^a &.pxeiv, and a-Topia-ufxev 
t6 <pp6v7i/j.a, — noted by the scholiast as Kar' 'A\Ki^i.dd7]v. 



110 ANCIENT GREElt HISTORIANS lect. 

Aeschylean ; and the naivete of the policeman in 
Sophocles is sufficiently revealed though he does 
not speak a policeman's language. 

But though Thucydides is always Thucydides, 
yet within the compass of his style there are 
remarkable variations. It is outside my scope to 
enter upon this subject in any detail ; to do justice 
to the styles of the writers who come before us 
would require another set of lectures. But in the 
case of Thucydides, I suspect that his different 
styles have a certain meaning for the treatment of 
his subject. It is patent to any reader that there 
is a difference between the narrative and the 
speeches, and that there are marked differences in 
the speeches themselves. Obscurity is a reproach 
which has constantly been brought against him 
and of which he cannot be acquitted. But it is 
not true of his work as a whole. The narrative is 
generally clear and straightforward. If it stood 
alone, we should never dream of describing him 
as obscure. Nor is this description true of the 
speeches indiscriminately. Some are lucid and 
simple ; others excessively obscure ; in others again 
we have perfectly simple passages beside sections 
which, with Dionysius, we may designate as 
conundrums or as darker than dark sayings of 
Heracleitus.^ I have taken obscurity and difficulty 
— difficulty which the Greeks felt no less than we 

1 It has been rightly pointed out by Mahaffy that it is a misapprehen- 
sion to explain the obscurities of Thucydides as due to condensation of 
thought. He is "condensed in expression but not in thought" {Greek 
Literature, ii. 1. 112). 



IV THUCYDIDES 111 

— as a rough test of distinction. But on what does 
this difficulty depend ? It depends on styhstic 
technique. There is no doubt that Thucydides 
was influenced by the rhetorical school of Gorgias, 
though he was not dominated by it. He modified 
it by peculiarities of his own ; but the affinity is 
unmistakably shown in the artificial balancing of 
clauses, the artificial verbal antitheses, the poetical 
phrase. Generally he keeps this tendency well in 
hand, but in some passages he deliberately allows 
it to run riot, and then he becomes obscure because 
the grammatical constructions have to be twisted 
unnaturally to subserve verbal effects. Some of 
these crooked passages produced upon a Greek 
ear almost the effect of dithyrambs released from 
the bonds of metre. Dionysius in his instructive 
criticism takes two passages as conspicuous for this 
fault (as he considered it), — the dialogue of the 
Athenian and Melian diplomatists, and the re- 
flexions upon the psychological and social aspects of 
civil sedition. Both might be described as elaborate 
studies in this kind of technique — the "obscure 
and contorted style." It is unnecessary, nor have 
I time, to illustrate it at length, but I will give one 
brief example. It is said in the Funeral Oration 
of Pericles, about soldiers who had fallen in battle : 

069 ivevSatfiovrjcrai re 6 /3i09 OfiOL(o<i Kol ivTeXevTTjaat ^vv- 

e^jueTprjOT]} To exprcss the meaning in tolerable 
English we have to render somewhat like this : 
" Whose days were so measured that the term of 

1 ii. 44. 



112 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

their happiness was also the term of their life." 
But this is a paraphrase, and it does not give the 
effect of the Greek. The literal translation is : 
"For whom life was made commensurate, to be 
happy in and to die in, alike." (Even this fails to 
bring out the force of the aorist tense ivevhaifjuovrjo-ao 
which suggests the familiar Greek saying, that a 
man's life cannot be judged happy till after his 
death.) But if the English is obscure and intoler- 
able, to a Greek ear, such as that of Dionysius, the 
Greek was hardly less so. 

Now is there any significance in this remarkable 
variation in style ? Is it purely capricious ? Does 
Thucydides break into dithyrambic prose just 
when, and simply because, he is in the mood? 
Such caprice would not be artistic, and it would 
not be Greek. If the difference in style corre- 
sponded to the distinction between narrative and 
speeches, the explanation would be ready. The 
speeches, in any case, serve the artistic purpose of 
pauses in the action ; they introduce the variety 
which Herodotus secured by digressions ; they 
fulfil somewhat the function of choruses in the 
drama. And so we should not be surprised to 
find a corresponding variety in the diction and 
technique. But the difference in style extends 
into the speeches themselves. 

The explanation which I would submit to you 
is that when Thucydides adopts what we may 
fairly call his unnatural style, when he is involved 
and obscure, he is always making points of his 



IV 



THUCYDIDES 113 



own. In support of this view, I allege the follow- 
ing considerations. (1) The meditation on the 
party - struggles in Greek states, though not a 
speech, belongs to this category. It interrupts 
the action ; it is, in fact, a speech of the author. 
And it is one of the flagrant examples of the 
unnatural style, and is commented on, as such, by 
Dionysius. Here then the author undisguisedly 
adopts this style for his own reflexions. (2) 
Secondly, take the Melian dialogue. Now whether 
we think, as some do, that such a conference was 
never held, or believe — and this is my opinion — 
that it was held, all agree that the actual conversa- . 
tion is in the main fictitious. I will return to this 
dialogue in another connexion. I would point out 
now that it is a clear case in which the unnatural 
style is employed for a political study of the 
author. Contrast it, as Dionysius contrasts it, 
with another dialogue, that between Archidamus 
and the Plataeans. This is in the natural style, 
and obviously gives the simple tenor of what 
passed on the occasion. (3) My third proof lies 
in the contrast between two of the speeches of 
Pericles. The speech he delivered before the war 
is so lucid and straightforward in style as to have 
satisfied Dionysius ; and at the same time it is 
perfectly appropriate to the situation, and no 
doubt gives the general drift of the Periclean 
argument. On the other hand, the speech which 
he delivers in self-defence, when he became un- 
popular, is marked in part by those obscurities 

r 



114 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

which excited the censure of Dionysius, and is 
also distinguished by unsuitable statements which 
could not have been addressed by any statesman 
to a public whose favour he desired to recover.^ 

I infer that when Thucydides writes in the 
unnatural style, he intends the reader to under- 
stand that he has here to do with the author 
himself — that the author is making points. When 
he writes in the natural style, he is producing 
documentary evidence. The speech of Pericles on 
the eve of the war is virtually a document. 

Let me make an application of this inference, 
which I think has some interest. The Epitaphios 
of Pericles is composed on the whole in the 
unnatural style. ^ It enshrines, as I believe, some 
utterances of Pericles himself; but the style is 
generally contorted and obscure, though we for- 
give, or may even find a certain pleasure in, this, 
so lofty is the spirit and so fine the thoughts; 
Now it is to be noted that, unlike other speeches, 
this funeral address does not cast any direct light 
on the events of the war, and that its tone is out 
of keeping with the occasion.^ There was no 
great action, no conspicuous deed of valour, in 
the first year of the war, yet this oration over 
the Athenians who fell in it is pitched in a key 



' I point out in the Appendix that it was composed or wrought over 
after the end of the war. 

2 The epigram of the Thucydidean Pericles on the virtue of women 
(ii. 45) may have been suggested by a saying of Gorgias. Wilamowitz- 
MoUendorflF, Hermes, ii. p. 294. 

3 This was observed by Dionysius. 



lY THUCYDIDES 115 

which would be appropriate to the burial of the 
heroes of a Thermopylae. My view is that 
Thucydides has seized this occasion to turn the light 
on Pericles himself. The Athens which Pericles 
here depicts is an ideal ; and the purpose of the 
historian is to bring out the fact that he was an 
idealist. The very incongruity between the occa- 
sion and the high-pitched strain of the orator 
heightens the calculated impression that Pericles, 
along with his political wisdom, possessed an 
imagination which outranged realities. 

If you were asked to translate into ancient 
Greek " he is an idealist," you could not, I think, 
find a more exact equivalent than ^rjTel dWo n, m^ 
€'iTo<; eiirelv, rj iv oh ^w/xev. This expression is applied 
by Cleon (in his speech about Mytilene^) to the 
Athenians in general, to whom it was hardly 
appropriate ; it was, I take it, a covert hit at 
the ethos and character of Pericles. Now both 
this speech of Cleon and the counter-speech of 
Diodotus are, by my criterion, largely composed 
of matter which is purely Thucydidean. The 
speech of Diodotus contains, you remember, 
reflexions on the general theory of punishment — 
the earliest discussion of the subject in literature ; 
and we know from other evidence that this was 
a question which had a special interest for Pericles. 
I venture therefore to think that one of the 
points which Thucydides wishes to make in these 
speeches is, that the more lenient treatment of the 



116 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

rebels of Mytilene was in accordance with the 
spirit of Periclean policy. With the spirit ; but 
it might have been argued that it was not in 
accordance with the letter and the logic ; and 
this, I think, is one of the points which Cleon's 
speech is intended to suggest. It is notable that 
while the speaker makes, as I think, an oblique 
hit at Periclean idealism, and strikes an anti- 
Periclean note in his dispraise of knowledge and 
criticism, at the same time he iterates phrases 
which occur in the Periclean speeches : " Empire 
means tyranny " ; '* Do not play the virtuous." 
Thucydides is here studying not only the contrast 
between the two politicians, but also the difficulties 
inherent in the Periclean imperialism. 

§ 2. Dramatic treatme7j.t of the historiae personae 

The speeches in general served two purposes. 
In the first place they were used by the author 
to explain the facts and elements of a situation, 
as well as underlying motives and ideas. In some 
cases the speech was only a dramatic disguise of 
a study of his own. Thus, the characters of the 
two protagonist cities, Athens and Sparta, are 
delineated in a speech of a third party, the Corin- 
thians : the author of this famous comparison was 
unquestionably Thucydides himself But in other 
cases he uses the actual expositions of politicians, — 
genuine political documents so far as the main 
tenor went, — as the most useful means of explaining 



IV THUCYDIDES 117 

a situation. The comparative advantages of the 
two contending powers for the coming war are 
stated in two speeches from opposite points of 
view/ The prospects and difficulties of the Sicilian 
expedition are set forth by the same means. 

The speeches had the second function — and 
here I return to the point from which I set out — 
of serving the objective dramatic method of 
indicating character which Thucydides chose to 
adopt.^ The speeches of Pericles, Cleon, Brasidas, 
Nicias, and Alcibiades, taken in conjunction with 
their actions, reveal as much of their characters as 
seemed to the author necessary for the matter in 
hand ; that is, those sides of their nature which 
in his opinion governed their public actions or 
affected their political influence. The general 
plan was that the men, as well as the events, 
should speak or be made to speak for themselves, 
with little or no direct comment from the writer. 

This method produced the illusion that the 
actors showed themselves to the reader indepen- 
dently of the author. It really meant that the 
author had framed a psychological estimate of 
them, as a dramatist constructs his characters : 
an estimate founded on his knowledge of their 
actions, but nevertheless no more than his own 
subjective interpretation. The reader is here 
almost as completely in the author's hands as in 

^ In the second speech of the Corinthians and the first of Pericles. 

2 Bruns (see Bibliography) was the first to study systematically the 
methods of the ancient historians in depicting character. I am much 
indebted to his well-known book. 



118 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

a drama. He has not the means of forming a 
corrective judgment for himself; for he does not 
know how the historian has arrived at his results. 

The application of the method may be observed 
in the cases of Cleon and Nicias. Thucydides held 
a distinct view of the character of Cleon as a poli- 
tician. He allows us to see it reflected from Cleon's 
actions and from the opinions of people about 
him. When he describes Cleon as an influential 
leader of the demos, who was very violent, namely 
in manner and speech, he only states a fact which 
was undoubtedly notorious and admitted. The 
oration of Cleon on the Lesbian question exhibits 
his fashion of rating the people like a pedagogue. 
The drastic judgment that, if Cleon's command 
at Pylos ended in disaster, this would be a great 
blessing, for it would rid the city of Cleon, is not 
recorded as the historian's own sarcasm ; it is 
mentioned as the opinion of some people at 
Athens. But as the people who thought so are 
called ".sensible" (adx^pove^), the disguise is here 
very thin ; the writer permits his own assent to 
be visible. No reader of the scenes in which 
Cleon appears would be left in any doubt that 
Cleon in the author's estimation was a pestilent 
demagogue ; but in one passage ^ Thucydides 
entirely abandons his dramatic reserve and ascribes 
the worst motives to the politician for his unwill- 
ingness to bring the war to a close. 

The portrait of Nicias, the conscientious patriot, 

1 V. 16. 1. 



IV THUCYDIDES 119 

an embodiment of respectability, cautious and 
experienced, but unendowed with first-rate talent, 
afraid of responsibility, afraid of the Ecclesia, is 
perhaps the most successful achievement of Thucy- 
dides in dramatic art. All this comes out in his 
actions and speeches. But in this case too the 
author once comes forward himself and directly 
construes the motives which actuated Nicias in 
working in the interests of peace. They were of 
a selfish nature : he thought of his own reputation ; 
he desired " while he had suffered no reverses and 
was held in repute, to preserve his good fortune ; 
he wished for rest himself as well as to give the 
people rest ; he hoped to leave his name to posterity 
as of one who had never brought calamity on the 
city ; and he thought that the best means to secure 
this was to trust as little as possible to fortune and 
to keep out of danger, which would be avoided by 
peace." ^ The irony is unmistakable. Again, in the 
last scene, when Nicias has been executed at Syra- 
cuse, the historian appears before the curtain for 
a moment and pronounces an epitaph, the point 
of which posterity has frequently misunderstood. 
It is generally taken as an encomium ; it is really 
malice. In my opinion, says Thucydides, Nicias 
deserved such an end less than any other Athenian, 
considering his conventional virtue.^ In other 
words, a man of such conventional virtue was 
unsuited for such an unconventional end. That 



1 V. 16. 2 (Jowett's translation). 
2 vevofj.i(r/iivr]. This interpretation is favoured by F. Cauer. 



120 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

is irony of a kind in which Thucydides rarely 
indulges ; behind it lurks the suppressed judgment 
that Athens was unfortunate in the trust which 
she reposed in Nicias, the model of irreproachable 
respectability. 

In the case of Alcibiades the historian dwells 
on the extravagance and display of his private life, 
because they had a direct influence on the feelings 
of the Athenians towards him, and affected his 
public career and the course of the war. But here 
too the character is revealed in actions and words ; 
insolence and ambition come out in his orations, 
and, as I have already observed, some strong phrases 
seem to be characteristic of his manner. Thucy- 
dides refrains from commenting on his character, but 
points out his services and shows that the Athenians 
regarded him with a suspicious apprehension which 
prevented them from profiting by his ability. 

In the cases of Themistocles, Pericles, and 
Antiphon, the author departs from his usual 
practice, and gives characterising judgments of 
his own. In the case of Themistocles this might 
be considered a necessary exception, as he does not 
come into the main narrative and cannot reveal 
himself dramatically. The same reason might be 
held partly to apply to Pericles, since the greater 
part of his lifework was over when he comes on 
the stage. The favourable notice of Antiphon's 
ability might also be explained by the fact that 
he had hardly appeared in the political arena before 
the year of the revolution, and his appearance then 



IV THUCYDIDES 121 

was so brief. The eulogy on Antiphon indeed has 
a personal note, which betrays perhaps a friendship. 
It is, however, futile to seek to explain or explain 
away these exceptions. The truth is that in 
general Thucydides is dramatic, but he- has not 
carried his method to extremes^ 

It is noteworthy that nearly all the judgments 
which he pronounces concern intelligence and 
political ability. This is the case with Themi- 
stocles, Pericles, Antiphon, Theramenes, and 
Hermocrates. They all receive greater or less 
praise for political capacity, which in the case of 
Themistocles is said to have amounted to genius. 

The case of Hyperbolus demands a few words, 
because it illustrates the method of Thucydides 
and his political leanings. In the years between 
the Fifty Years' Peace and the Sicilian Expedition, 
the division of parties under the opposing leaders 
Nicias and Alcibiades paralysed the foreign policy 
of Athens and hindered continuity of action. The 
situation was so serious that the only way out 
seemed that proposed by the demagogue Hyper- 
bolus — a trial of ostracism, which would expel one 
of the rivals and secure unity. Alcibiades frus- 
trated this device by combining, if not with his 
rival, at least with a sufficiently large oligarchical 
faction, to procure the ostracism of Hyperbolus. 
Thucydides does not say a word about this affair, 
though of course he was perfectly aware of the 
facts, and though they had an immediate bearing 
on the foreign policy of Athens. We must suppose 



122 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

that as the purpose of the ostracism was defeated 
and the relative positions of the two leaders were 
not altered by the vote, he considered it super- 
fluous to record the occurrence. It will be 
admitted, however, that a modern historian who 
allowed himself such an omission or carried his 
principle of exclusion so far, would not escape 
censorious criticism. But in another connexion, 
Thucydides refers to the ostracism, without dating 
it, or in any way suggesting its significance. 
Hyperbolus was killed in 411 B.C. at Samos. 
Thucydides records this and mentions that Hyper- 
bolus had been ostracized. This is the only place 
where he names the demagogue, who in the years 
following Cleon's death had been one of the most 
influential speakers in the Ecclesia. We might 
suspect that in ignoring this politician, just as he 
ignored men of the same type like Eucrates and 
Lysicles, he exercised a reserve which was equi- 
valent to an adverse criticism, a negative expression 
of contempt ; but no doubt is permitted by the 
words in which he paints his memory black. 
Hyperbolus was ostracized, we are told, not 
because he was esteemed dangerous, but because 
he was an unprincipled scoundrel and a disgrace 
to the city. The same epithet (/xoxOvpo^) is here 
applied to Hyperbolus which was applied to him 
by Aristophanes.^ We may note how Thucydides 
violates here his own principle of relevance. At 
this moment, Hyperbolus is not interesting or 

1 Knights, 1304. 



IV THUCYDIDES 123 

important, and in holding up his character to 
reprobation the historian is deviating from his 
narrative. Again, what he says of the cause of 
the ostracism is untrue. Hyperbolus was not 
ostracized because he was a disgrace to the city, 
whether he was so or not. He would not have 
been ostracized if the supporters of Alcibiades had 
not been instructed to write his name on the sherds 
instead of that of the virtuous Nicias. We know 
very little about Hyperbolus ; but this judgment 
of Thucydides cannot be taken as objective or 
impartial. It is quite clear that he had a profound 
antipathy to popular leaders like Cleon and Hyper- 
bolus, and that he was incapable of doing them 
whatever justice they deserved. And such anti- 
pathy is sufficient to account for the treatment 
of Cleon, without invoking a further motive of 
personal resentment for any part Cleon may have 
taken in procuring the condemnation of the 
historian.^ 

§ 3. Rationalistic view of history 

It is by his practice of allowing his characters to 
reveal themselves by their actions and words, while 
keeping himself in the background, although he 
does not adhere to this plan with pedantic con- 
sistency, that the art of Thucydides may be 
appropriately called dramatic. The description of 
" dramatic " has indeed been claimed for his history 

^ F. M. Cornford touches on this point in his Thucydides Mythistoricus. 
I think he is right. The hypothesis of personal spite is superfluous. 



124 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

on another ground. It has been thought that he 
viewed the whole war under the scheme of a 
tragedy, in which the Sicilian expedition was the 
peripeteia or "reversal" of fortune for Athens. 
This idea has recently been developed in a new 
shape by Mr. F. M. Cornford, in a brilliant study 
which seeks to establish that the historian read 
Aeschylean conceptions into the events of the war 
and mounted it, like a tragedy, with the dark 
figures of Tyche, Hybris, Peitho, and Eros, 
moving in the background and prompting the 
human actors. That such a conception should 
be read by an ingenious scholar in a work which 
impresses the ordinary reader as entirely matter 
of fact in its treatment of political transactions, 
illustrates what a wonderful book the history of 
Thucydides is. The truth is, I think, that the 
style of Thucydides was influenced by the Attic 
drama, no less than by the rhetoric of Gorgias, and 
it is one of the merits of Mr. Cornford's mono- 
graph to have illustrated this influence. But that 
the tragic phrases and reminiscences, and the occa- 
sional use of tragic irony, cannot be held to have 
more than a stylistic significance, and that Thucy- 
dides did not intend to cast the war into the typical 
scheme of a tragic development, will be apparent if 
we consider his own clear statements. 

His view of the causes of the collapse of Athens 
displays the difference between his own outlook on 
human affairs and that of Herodotus. The older 
historian pourtraying the collapse of the Persian 



IV THUCYDIDES 125 

power discerns, in the development of the plot, 
imminent above the actors a superhuman control 
and the occult operation of nemesis. The only- 
external influence recognised by the younger writer 
appears in the form of the incalculable element 
which he calls Tyche, Chance. Herodotus inter- 
preted history and life, in the sense that the decline 
of a state or of a man from a post of commanding 
eminence was due to the action of a supernatural 
power which would not tolerate the exaltation 
which invariably leads to immoderate elation of soul 
and often to acts of insolence and rashness. In 
one of the speeches in Thucydides this anthropo- 
pathic idea is translated into the dry formula : " It 
is the nature of human things to decline." But 
it can hardly be said that he believed unreservedly 
in this principle (which may be found in Ionian 
philosophers) as a certain fact. And his analysis 
of the course of the war and his explanation 
of its issue show that the operation of the incal- 
culable element of chance need not be decisive. 
It contributed to the decline of the Athenian 
power, but that power might have survived and 
defied its outrages, if it had not been for human 
mismanagement. 

In the early stage of the war there were two 
cases of the play of the incalculable. There was 
first of all the plague. But though severe, maim- 
ing and weakening more than anything else the 
offensive power of the State for years to come, it 
was not crushing, it did not spell doom ; one of its 



126 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

gravest consequences was the psychical effect upon 
the Athenians, for which Pericles suffered. The 
other surprise of fortune was a kind one, the 
combination of circumstances which helped the 
Athenians to their stroke of luck at Pylos. This 
elated them, as the pestilence had cast them down. 
Instead of grasping the opportunity of making 
advantageous terms and bringing to an end a war 
which they would gladly have concluded on any 
terms a few years before, they were incited to 
hopes of new conquest. But the consequences 
were by no means disastrous ; the Peace of 421 
B.C. left the balance of power much the same. 

They had recovered from the effects of the 
plague and the war when they undertook the 
conquest of Sicily in 415 B.C. The catastrophe of 
that enterprise was the beginning of a gradual 
decline, which was determined by domestic dissen- 
sions in Athens, and afterwards by the intervention 
of Persia. A modern historian has designated the 
Sicilian expedition as an act of insanity, an instance 
of a whole people gone mad, analogous to the case 
of England in the Crimean war. But this was 
not the opinion of Thucydides. He says, and he 
is speaking in his own name, that it was not an 
error of judgment in the design or in the calcula- 
tion of strength, and would have been a success, if 
it had been properly supported and carried out. 
The verdict of the modern writer was influenced 
partly by ethical considerations ; the verdict of 
Thucydides did not take ethics into account ; he 



IV THUCYDIDES 127 

only contemplates the question whether, judging 
the strength of Athens and the resistance offered 
to her, the ambition of extending her empire to 
Sicily was reasonable or foolish. The failure of 
the enterprise and the reverses of the ensuing years 
he imputes to the dissensions at home ; and in the 
same way he explains mismanagement in the earlier 
period of the war by the jealousies of rival poli- 
ticians. In other words, the key to the decline of 
Athenian power was the fact that Pericles had no 
successors. The city began to fall away from her 
eminence when her government was no longer 
controlled by an able leader. 

Even after the Sicilian expedition, the situation 
might have been retrieved ; for there was a man 
marked out to be a leader like Pericles, if the 
Athenians had trusted him. This was Alcibiades. 
That this was the view which Thucydides formed 
of Alcibiades can, I think, admit of little doubt. 
The distrust of the Athenians, he says, contributed 
heavily to the fall of the city ; Alcibiades con- 
ducted the war with masterly ability.^ In other 
words, things would have turned out very dif- 
ferently, if the conduct of affairs had been 
entrusted to him. The distrust is attributed to 
the somewhat insolent display and splendour of his 
private life, which excited envy and the suspicion 
of tyrannical designs. Nicias taunts him with this 
\afi7rp6Tr)<i, Alcibiades glories in it.^ Now the career 
of Alcibiades had remarkable points of resemblance 

1 vi. 15. ^ vi.l2; 16. 



128 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

with that of a great Athenian statesman of a former 
age, Themistocles. They were both banished from 
Athens ; both conspired with her enemies against 
her ; and Alcibiades like Themistocles became a 
trusted adviser of the Persians. But another 
point of likeness is indicated by Thucydides, Xa/x- 
7rp6T7)<;. It is not for nothing that he describes 
Themistocles and Pausanias as the most magni- 
ficent or luxurious of the Greeks of their time 
{\a/ji7rpoTdTov<;). That was a weak point in the case 
of Themistocles as in that of Alcibiades ; it led to 
the suspicion of tyranny. This parallel suggests 
that one motive of the digression on Themistocles 
was to point it. At all events it throws light on 
the view of the historian. Athens produced three 
men who had the faculty, which cannot be learned 
by study, for guiding the affairs of a great state, 
Themistocles, Pericles, and Alcibiades. Two of 
them fell into the snare of luxurious splendour, 
which ruined their careers. Pericles avoided that 
pitfall, and won and retained the public confidence. 
This contrast, I would observe, gives special point 
to a famous phrase in the Epitaphios, Pericles 
himself was (jjiXoKoXo^ fier evreketa^, he was not 
Xa/jbTTpo'i, he indulged his private tastes without 
undue or obtrusive expense. 

This analysis, which is furnished by the his- 
torian's own comments, eliminates entirely the 
dim superstitious notions of doom and nemesis, 
which do duty for Providence in Herodotus and 
dispense the spectator from any deeper study of 



IV THUCYDIDES 129 

the course and causes of events. Thucydides deals 
with purely human elements ; human brains bear 
the ultimate responsibility. There is nothing 
mysterious about the fact that events cannot be 
foreseen. The course of events, says Pericles, may 
sometimes be as incalculable by reason as the 
thoughts of a man's mind. Thucydides does not 
regard the plague as a divine dispensation. It 
was simply an occurrence which could not be fore? 
seen, exactly as you may not foresee the moves of 
your enemy. Herodotus credits the oracles with 
mysterious knowledge ; Thucydides occasionally 
refers to oracles, but their sole significance for him 
lies in the psychical effect they produce on those 
who believe them. Of the oracle which predicted 
that the war would last twenty-seven years, he drily 
observes that it is the only one to which people 
who put their faith in oracles can point as having 
been certainly fulfilled. Here he was at the same 
standpoint as Anaxagoras and Pericles.^ The 
philosophers who had established the reign of law 
had not written in vain for Thucydides.^ Chance 
means for him the same kind of thing that it 
means for us ; it does not signify the interference 
of an external will or caprice ; it simply represents 
an element which cannot be foretold. He recog- 
nises the operation of the unknown ; he does not 
recognise the presence of "things occult." And 

^ He speaks indeed strangely of the frequency of solar eclipses during 
the war (i. 23. 3), as if they had some significance for the human race ; 
we may wonder what comment Anaxagoras would have made. 

^ Cp. Gomperz, Oriechische Denker, i. p. 61 (on Heracleitus). 



130 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

he reduces the unknown to its minimum of signi- 
ficance for human hfe. The great philosopher, 
Democritus of Abdera, had said : " Chance is an 
idol which men fashioned to excuse their own 
mental incapacity. As a matter of fact chance 
seldom conflicts with wisdom. In most affairs of 
life, an intelligent mind can exercise clairvoyance 
with success."^ These words of Democritus 
might serve as a motto for Thucydides. 

The elements for the conception of the war as 
a tragedy, in the proper sense of the word, were 
absent from his interpretation of the course of 
history. There was no mysterious controlling 
force, no doom or retribution, no inevitable decree 
of fate, no moral principle at stake. The lessons 
which the catastrophe conveyed were not moral or 
cathartic. The war was full of instructive lessons 
for statesmen and generals ; but those lessons were 
assuredly of a very different order from the lessons 
of Aeschylus and Sophocles. And the occasional 
use of phraseology, which the tragedians charged 
with meaning, should not mislead us. Just as a 
writer of the present day who is completely inno- 
cent of any traffic with the supernatural may 
employ such terms as fate, doom, nemesis, so 
Thucydides could borrow the personified abstrac- 
tions of tragedy for purposes of expression, without 
meaning to suggest anything occult. If I say that 

^ Democritus, in Mullach, Frag. Phil. 167, Thucydides observes 
sub persona Hermocratis (iv. 62. 4) that in war the incalculable element 
has its uses ; it is the same for both and conduces to caution and 
prudence. 



IV THUCYDIDES 131 

I have been prompted to do something by an imp 
of mischief or by a demon of unrest, you will not 
impute to me a belief in demons or imps. If 
Thucydides has sometimes expressed psychological 
observations in the language of tragic poets, this 
does not prove that he looked at history from a 
tragic poet's point of view. 



§ 4. Political analysis 

Attempts have inevitably been made to peer 
behind the scenes and discover the personal political 
views or tendencies of this singularly reserved 
historian. Dionysius, a critic who is usually in- 
structive though never profound and often obtuse, 
stigmatizes in Thucydides a lack of patriotism so 
marked as to amount to positive ill - will both 
towards Greece and towards Athens. " He began 
at a point where the Greek world had begun to 
decline. A Greek and Athenian should not have 
done this, especially one who was no outcast but 
had been honoured by the Athenians with high 
command. He was so malicious that he imputed 
to his own city the open causes of the war, though 
he might have found means to attach the responsi- 
bility to other cities. He could have begun not 
with the Corcyraean affair but with the supreme 
successes of his country after the Persian war, and 
could have shown that it was through jealousy and 
fear, the consequence of these successes, that the 
Lacedaemonians, alleging other reasons, began the 



132 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

war." ^ When this criticism is examined, it will be 
found that it mainly touches the arrangement of 
the first Book,^ but it shows that the narrative 
produced upon Dionysius the impression that 
Thucydides was unpatriotic. 

On the other hand, it is held by some modern 
critics that the account of the beginnings and first 
years of the war is virtually a defence of the policy 
of Pericles, and it is even insinuated that the 
author manipulated facts, concealing some and 
mitigating others, with the purpose of presenting 
that policy in a favourable light. This view 
evidently contradicts that of Dionysius ; it implies 
that Thucydides sympathized with Athens during 
the Periclean regime and at the outbreak of the 
war. 

The fact that the narrative can convey two such 
contradictory impressions is a certificate of the 
author's critical impartiality. The censure of 
Dionysius is based on the conventional principle of 
later times that it is a historian's duty to be patri- 
otic at all costs, to sacrifice his critical judgment; 
and it is superfluous to refute his charge of ill- 
will. On the other hand, the theory that Thucy- 
dides was an unreserved admirer of Pericles and 
deliberately intended to exalt and defend his policy, 
almost as a partisan, has some prima facie plausi- 
bility, and, as it has a direct bearing on the writer's 

^ Letter to Pompeius, 3. 9, 

- But he also blames Thucydides, 3. 4, 5, for the choice of his subject. 
The war was oiire KaXbs oOre evTvxn^, and therefore should be forgotten and 
ignored by posterity. 



IV THUCYDIDES 133 

attitude to history and politics, we must consider 
it more particularly. 

We have seen how Thucydides speaks in the 
highest terms of the political ability of Pericles, and 
was convinced that, if he had lived or had a 
successor as able as himself, the war would have 
terminated favourably for Athens. But this general 
conviction would be quite compatible with dis- 
criminating criticism. The tribute which he has 
paid to Pericles does not imply that he saw eye to 
eye with the statesman in all things or held his 
political faith. There are proofs, in my opinion, 
that he exercised here, as in other cases, a cold 
independent judgment, and had no scruples in 
exhibiting weak points. 

The speeches of Pericles claim our special atten- 
tion. I may begin by pointing out that the praise 
which Pericles bestows in the Epitaphios^ on the 
democratic constitution of Athens, implying that 
it was an ideal form of government, is not in 
accordance with the view of Thucydides, who 
expressly states that in his opinion the short-lived 
poUteia which was established in Athens after the 
fall of the Four Hundred was not merely superior 
to democracy, but was the only good constitution 
that Athens had enjoyed in his lifetime.^ In other 
words, he did not consider democracy a good con- 
stitution. In the second place, we may feel con- 

1 ii. 37. 

^ viii. 97 Kal ovx riKKTra Stj rbv irpCsTov x/'O"*"' f''"' 7' ^M"'^ 'KO-qvaioi. 
ipalvovTai ed iroXiTeicravTes. Is the reserve enl y' i/j.oO simply cautiousness, 
or is it an allusion to the ira.Tpi.os wdXiTeia of early times ? 



134 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

fident that the eloquent and fascinatmg portrait of 
Athens, drawn by Pericles, did not in the historian's 
opinion correspond to reality. It was the Peri- 
clean ideal. And Thucydides knew perfectly well 
that the claim that Athens was the school of liberal 
education for Greece would have been scouted 
by other states ; and, as a matter of fact, it did not 
become anything of the kind till after the Pelopon- 
nesian war. Again, it seems more than doubtful 
whether Thucydides approved of the Periclean 
policy of bringing all the inhabitants of Attica into 
the city. The length at which he dwells on the 
unpleasant consequences of this arrangement, his 
pains in showing how distasteful it was to the 
people, suggest that he considered it a measure of 
highly questionable wisdom. 

He certainly looked on Pericles as the most 
successful statesman who had recently guided the 
counsels of Athens. But he saw him, like all his 
other dramatis personae, in a dry light, and, as I 
have suggested, he has presented one side of the 
statesman's mind with a certain veiled irony. 

The dramatic detachment of Thucydides readily 
produced the impression that he was unpatriotic. 
He allows every party to state their case as 
strongly and persuasively as possible. But while 
he wrote not as a patriot but as a historian, it is 
Athens, not Sparta, the Athenian Empire, not the 
Peloponnesian Confederacy, in which the interest 
of the narrative centres throughout. As to the 
questions at stake and the issues involved in the 



IV THUCYDIDES 135 

war, what we may hope to discover is not what 
political views the historian held, but what was his 
attitude of mind in observing political events. 

His interest centres in the Athenian empire. 
In the passage in which he offers a general explana- 
tion of the result of the war he writes from the 
Athenian side entirely. Now as to the nature of 
the Athenian empire he has no illusions. In the 
first Book he unfolds the unscrupulous way in 
which it was acquired, with perfect candour. He 
states that it was generally unpopular, and he 
allots a speech to an indictment of it by one of the 
subject states. That it was a despotism based not 
on right but on might is not merely alleged by the 
opponents of Athens but is emphasized by Athenian 
speakers. The Athenian diplomatist who spoke at 
the Congress of Sparta characterizes it without any 
reserve as having been won from motives of self- 
confidence and ambition ; and the justification 
assigned is that it is a law of human nature that 
the weaker should be constrained by the stronger. 
Pericles is still more candid and emphatic. " The 
Empire you possess," he says, "is a tyranny; it 
may have been unjust to acquire, it is perilous to 
relinquish it." Again : " That man is truly wise 
who incurs odium for the highest stakes. Hatred 
does not balance the present magnificence and the 
future fame." Here power, wealth, and glory are 
assigned as a justification of an unjustly gotten and 
unpopular empire. Arguing against the peace- 
party — 01 aTTpdy/jiove'i — who have scruples about 



136 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

justice, Pericles takes the same line, though with 
more cynicism, as a modern British chauvinist con- 
temptuous of those whom he calls the Little Eng- 
landers. He sneers at their conscience, which, he 
suggests, is a cloak for cowardice. Alcibiades in 
advocating the Sicilian expedition points out the 
necessity to imperial states of an active and aggres- 
sive policy. Hermocrates, the enemy of Athens, 
does not complain of such a policy on grounds 
of morality ; he says : " I can fully pardon the 
Athenians for their grasping policy ; I do not 
blame those who seek empire, but those who are 
ready to submit ; for it has always been the natural 
instinct of man to rule him who yields and to resist 
the aggressor." 

The excuse which both Hermocrates and 
Athenians urge for the acquisition of empire is 
the instinct of human nature. But Pericles also 
attempted what may be called a justification on 
higher grounds. In the Funeral Oration he draws 
a picture of the grandeur and the culture of 
Athens. There, he so much as says, is the ideal 
which our city, by winning power and wealth, 
through an empire which was certainly not built 
on foundations of justice, has realised for the 
admiration and imitation of Hellas. Such things 
cannot be achieved by timid justice and stay-at- 
home piety. This is the leit-motif of the Funeral 
Oration. 

Thus the historian kept before, himself, and 
keeps before us, the fact that the empire cannot be 



IV THUCYDIDES 137 

defended on grounds of justice, that it could not be 
maintained except hj force vic^eitre, and that if 
slavery was an extreme word for the condition of 
the subject states, they were generally reluctant 
under the yoke. It is further to be observed that 
when Thucydides makes occasional reflexions of 
his own, he never takes justice or morality into 
account, from which we may infer that in his 
estimation those conceptions did not illuminate 
the subject. He recognised that the ideal of 
justice was an actual psychological force and could 
not be neglected by statesmen, any more than 
popular religion. But he did not consider it worth 
while to apply the standard of justice in estimating 
political transactions, just as he did not ask whether 
an action was pleasing to the gods. 

The speech of Diodotus, advocating lenient 
treatment for the rebels of Mytilene, is interesting 
in this connexion. As the speaker played no part 
in history except here, the harangue must be intro- 
duced solely for the sake of its arguments. Its 
chief interest is that it repudiates the intrusion of 
justice into the question ; the speaker reproaches 
Cleon for having dragged in so irrelevant a con- 
sideration, and bases his own view entirely on 
reasons of state. Thucydides with his usual reti- 
cence abstains from comment, though the tone of 
his narrative suggests that he sympathized with the 
lenient policy ; but the fact that he chose these 
speeches of Cleon and Diodotus for working up, 
and that he has worked them up largely in the 



138 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

style which he employs when he is not docu- 
mentary, shows that his interest lay in the logic of 
policy. 

In the light of the debate on Mytilene we may 
consider the notorious debate of the Athenian and 
Melian representatives. Melos, you remember, 
was an independent state. Athens had made an 
attempt to force her into her empire in 426 B.C. ; 
the idea was not resumed till 416 B.C., but in the 
meantime the relations of the two states had been 
hostile. When the expedition reached the island, 
the generals sent envoys to demand submission. 
They were admitted to a round-table conference 
with members of the Melian government, and 
Thucydides gives in the form of a dialogue what 
purposes to be the tenor of the debate. That such 
a conference was held, there cannot be a reasonable 
doubt, nor is it improbable that Thucydides had 
something to work upon. There is no difficulty in 
supposing that he might have heard enough from 
some one who knew to furnish him with a text. 

The note of the dialogue is the elimination of 
justice from the discussion, by the Athenians. 
"Lass unsern Herr Gott aus dem Spass." The 
field of the argument is confined to policy and 
reason of state. When the Melians essay to find 
an issue from this restricted ground by observing 
that, being innocent of wrong, they expect a 
heaven-sent chance to intervene in their favour, 
the Athenians retort that gods as well as men 
recognise it to be a law of nature that the weaker 



IV THUCYDIDES 139 

should be ruled by the stronger. Now this is 
nothing more than what had already been said by 
Hermocrates and the Athenian envoy at Sparta. 
The attitude of the Athenians on this occasion is 
exactly the same as that of Diodotus in arguing 
for leniency towards Mytilene. Both alike are 
ruthlessly realistic ; both alike refuse to consider 
any reason but reason of state. The conscience 
and feelings of the readers of Thucydides have 
been shocked by the tone of the Athenians 
at Melos because they sympathize with Melos ; 
whereas they are not shocked by Diodotus because 
they sympathize with Mytilene. Yet Diodotus in 
427 B.C. regarded Mytilene just as Athens in 
416 B.C. regarded Melos, merely as a pawn in the 
game of empire. It is also important to observe 
that the discussion in the Melian council-chamber 
before the siege has nothing to do with the rigorous 
treatment of the people after the capture of the 
city. A few years before, Athens had meted out 
the same treatment to Scione ; all the adult males 
were killed, the women and children enslaved. 
Thucydides makes no comment in either case. 
But if Athens had contented herself with reducing 
Melos to the condition of a tributary, the notorious 
dialogue would have been equally to the point. 
The policy of annexing Melos was one thing, the 
policy of punishing was another ; Thucydides does 
not express his views on either. But it has been 
supposed by various critics that he introduced a 
cynical dialogue for the purpose of holding up to 



140 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

obloquy the conduct of Athens, and even of making 
it appear an ill-omened prelude to the disastrous 
expedition against Sicily. This theory will not, in 
my opinion, bear examination. Thucydides, as we 
have seen, did not consider that the Sicilian expedi- 
tion was ill-advised in principle, and he does not 
hint that any consequences, bad or good for Athens, 
ensued from the conquest of Melos. 

The truth is, I think, that Thucydides took the 
opportunity of the round-table conference to 
exhibit, pure and unvarnished, the springs of 
political action. The motives and arguments of 
the Athenians, whether wisely or unwisely applied 
in this particular case, were nothing new ; they 
were the same which lay at the foundation of all 
their empire-building. This was the first case of a 
new annexation since the outbreak of the war, and 
it was the first occasion oiFered to the historian to 
analyse imperial policy from the point of view of 
aggression ; he had already examined it from the 
point of view of preservation. The Melian dialogue 
only develops more undisguisedly and expressly — 
and the circumstance that no public was present 
gave the author the artistic pretext for candour — 
what is to be found in all the argumentative 
speeches : that not justice but reason of state is the 
governing consideration which guides the action of 
cities and claims the interest of historians. 

We are now in a position to understand the 
attitude of Thucydides. His object is to examine 
and reveal political actions from an exclusively 



IV THUCYDIDES 141 

political point of view. He does not consider moral 
standards ; his method is realistic and detached ; 
he takes history as it is and examines it on its own 
merits. This detached analytical treatment is illus- 
trated by the earliest political prose pamphlet we 
possess, written by a contemporary of the historian 
in the early years of the war ; I mean the short 
tract on the Athenian Constitution. The author 
was an oligarch and declares without reserve his 
personal hostility to the democracy ; but it is not a 
polemical work. He detaches himself from his 
own feelings, places himself at the point of view of 
democrats, and examines democracy exclusively in 
this light. Applying his acute logic, he demon- 
strates that the institutions of Athens could hardly 
be improved upon. The writer is intellectually 
allied to Thucydides in the detachment of his atti- 
tude and the logical restriction of the issue under 
a particular point of view. 

Now when Thucydides offers reflexions in 
propria persona on events, his criticisms, on the 
policy of Athens, for instance, or on the value of an 
Athenian politician, are generally determined by 
the consideration whether they were conducive to 
success or failure in the war. In his appreciation 
of Brasidas, he places himself at the point of view 
of Sparta, and recognises that this general's con- 
duct, policy, and character were conducive to the 
extension of Spartan power in competition with 
Athens. He takes the objects of the conflicting 
states as given, without approving or condemning ; 



142 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

and in recording acts and methods his rare verdicts 
of praise or blame are confined to the question 
whether those acts and methods were calculated to 
achieve their object; just as in characterizing a 
man he refers only to his intellectual powers. He 
offers no opinion whether the aims were justifiable 
or admirable ; he applies no ethical standard to 
policies or politicians. 

Of course, he was fully conscious of ethical 
questions which arise in connexion with high 
politics, and these questions raise their heads in 
the dramatic parts of the work. In the speeches, 
justice and expediency are frequently distinguished 
and opposed. A speaker, for example, according 
to circumstances, is concerned to show that a 
course which is just is also expedient, or that 
expedience ought to be preferred to justice. 
Sometimes the consideration of justice is briefly 
dismissed as irrelevant. It appears as a psychical 
factor actually operative in international transac- 
tions, a principle to which at least homage of the 
lips was paid, by which praise and blame were 
popularly awarded, and which therefore had to be 
taken into account. But its role was slight and 
subordinate : the dramatist could not ignore it, 
though he allows it as small a range as he can ; the 
thinker dismissed it. 

There is not, so far as I can discover, any reason 
for believing that Thucydides thought or intended 
to suggest that an uncompromising policy of self- 
interest conduced to the fall of the Athenian 



IV THUCYDIDES 143 

empire, or that her wrong and unwise actions 
were wrong and unwise because they were guided 
by considerations of expediency alone. There is 
no ground for supposing that he would have 
had a thought of censure, if he had lived in our 
own days, for statesmen like Cavour and Bismarck 
and Disraeli, who were guided exclusively by 
reason of state, and are therefore blamed by 
moralists for having debased the moral currency 
in Europe. If, instead of a history, Thucydides 
had written an analytical treatise on politics, with 
particular reference to the Athenian empire, it is 
probable that he would occupy a different place 
from that which he holds actually in the world's 
esteem ; he would have forestalled the fame of , 
Machiavelli. 

Thucydides simply observes facts ; Machiavelli 
lays down maxims and prescribes methods ; but the 
whole innuendo of the Thucydidean treatment of 
history agrees with the fundamental postulate of 
Machiavelli, the supremacy of reason of state. 
To maintain a state, said the Florentine thinker, 
"a statesman is often compelled to act against 
faith, humanity, and religion." In Thucydides, 
reason of state appears as actually the sovran guide 
in the conduct of affairs. But the essential point 
of comparison is that both historians, in examining 
history and politics, abstracted from all but political 
considerations, and applied logic to this restricted 
field. Machiavelli — the true Machiavelli, not the 
Machiavelli of fable, the scelerum inventor Ulixes 



144 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

— entertained an ideal : Italy for the Italians, Italy 
freed from the stranger : and in the service of this 
ideal he desired to see his speculative science of 
politics applied. Thucydides had no political aim 
in view ; he was purely a historian ; his interest 
was to investigate the actual policy of Athens in 
maintaining and losing her empire. But it was 
part of the method of both alike to eliminate 
conventional sentiment and morality. 

A certain use of the term aperri by Thucydides 
has an interest in this connexion. It is sometimes 
said that he did not assign great importance to the 
action and role of individuals. This seems to me 
a mistake, due to the circumstance that he does 
not draw personal portraits in the manner of sub- 
sequent historians. For it is evident that he 
considered the brains and wisdom of him whom he 
calls *' the first man " as largely responsible for the 
success of Athenian policy before the Pelopon- 
nesian war. We can read between the lines that 
in his view the Peisistratids, Themistocles, and 
Alcibiades were also forces which counted for a 
great deal. The pre-eminent significance of the 
individual was a tenet of Machiavelli and his con- 
temporaries (a classical feature of the Renaissance) ; 
it was a prince, an individual brain and will, to 
which he looked for the deliverance and regenera- 
tion of Italy. Both writers conceived the individual, 
as a political factor, purely from the intellectual 
side. Now Thucydides has used apeTr) in his notice 
of the oligarch Antiphon, to express the intelli- 



IV THUCYDIDES 145 

gence, dexterity, and will-power of a competent 
statesman, in sharp contradistinction to the con- 
ventional dperi] of the popular conception. The 
only appropriate equivalent by which we can 
render in a modern language this Thucydidean 
apeTTJ is a key-word of Machiavelli's system, virtUy 
a quality possessed by men like Francesco Sforza 
and Cesare Borgia.^ 

It must be understood that this attitude of 
Thucydides only concerns international politics, 
the subject of his work. Domestic politics lie, 
except incidentally, outside his scope. When he 
turns aside to describe the disintegrating influence 
of party faction on the internal conditions of 
Greek states, he recognises the important opera- 
tion of ethical beliefs and religious sanctions in 
holding a society together. But where national 
aims are at stake and international rivalries are in 
motion, no corresponding beliefs and sanctions 
appear, possessing the same indefeasible value for 
the success and prosperity of a state. There is 
irony in his remark that the Lacedaemonians, after 
the first war had come to an end, ascribed their 
own want of success to the fact that they had 
refused the Athenian proposition to submit the 
Peloponnesian grievances to arbitration, in accord- 
ance with the Thirty Years' Peace. It is note- 
worthy that in the Funeral Oration of Pericles, 



^ Since writing this paragraph, I observe that Murray had already 
compared this dperij to virtii (in his chapter on Thucydides, History of 
Greek Literature). 

L 



146 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

where he pourtrays the qualities of his countrymen, 
there is not a single word about those conventional 
virtues in which Nicias shone. The Athenians are 
praised for their political intelligence and versa- 
tility, for their adventurous activity, for enlight- 
ened freedom in their intercourse with strangers, 
and for other excellent things. Not a word is said 
of their piety, and they were certainly pious. We 
are told that they have accomplished much and 
reached the heights by their own talents and their 
own toil. There is not a word, not a single per- 
functory phrase, of assistance or favour from 
heaven. Of religion, or of morality in the con- 
ventional sense, there is not a syllable from the 
beginning to the end of this brilliant speech. 
Pericles could hardly have avoided at least some 
conventional reference to the gods, in the speech 
he actually delivered at the sepulture ; that 
Thucydides overlooked it is significant. 

If this appreciation of the historian is sympa- 
thetic, I hope you will not suppose that I belong 
to the band of devotees who make a cult of Thucy- 
dides and can see no defects in their idol. Such 
devotees existed in ancient as well as in modern 
times, and the historian's ancient indiscriminating 
admirers received a very proper rebuke from 
Dionysius of Halicarnassus. I have already 
suggested that he carried his method of exclusion 
and omission too far. His treatment of individuals 
displays a more serious limitation in his idea of 
historical reconstruction. Thucydides does not 



IV THUCYDIDES 147 

seem to have grasped fully that in estimating the 
action of an individual in history his whole 
character must be taken into account ; he is a 
psychical unity, and it is not possible to detach 
and isolate certain qualities. Psychological recon- 
struction is one of the most important as well as 
delicate problems which encounter the historian, 
and Thucydides failed to realise all that it means. 
In his impatience of biographical trivialities, he 
went to the extreme of neglecting biography alto- 
gether. Take, for instance, his silence concerning 
the personality of Pericles. This statesman was 
one of the forces which operated in bringing about 
the war, and to understand his actions we want to 
know more about his personality. Thucydides is 
content to note his consummate political ability 
and his indifference to money, and to indicate his 
idealism. This does not enable us to realise what 
manner of man Pericles was ; we still feel, and 
modern criticism illustrates this, that he is in many 
respects an unknown or at least ambiguous quantity. 
The work of Thucydides has limitations which 
we must beware of underrating ; but it marks the 
longest and most decisive step that has ever been 
taken by a single man towards making history 
what it is to-day. Out of the twilight in which 
Herodotus still moved wondering, he burst into 
the sunlight where facts are hard, not to wonder 
but to understand. With the Greeks historical 
study never acquired the scientific character which 
it was reserved for the nineteenth century to 



148 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

impress upon it. But within the limits of the task 
he attempted Thucydides was a master in the craft 
of investigating contemporary events, and it may 
be doubted whether within those limits the nine- 
teenth century would have much to teach him. If 
he had admitted his readers into the secrets of his 
workshop, if he had more clearly displayed his raw 
material and shown how he arrived at his conclu- 
sion, if he had argued and discussed, he might have 
exercised a greater influence than he did on the 
methods of subsequent Greek historians. His in- 
complete work, posthumously published, had an 
immediate and far-reaching result in establishing 
political history ; and in the next lecture we shall 
see how men of the younger generation received a 
stimulus from him. But, although the value and 
greatness of his work were at once recognised, 
and he always remained the one and undisputed 
authority on the period he had treated, yet, for 
several centuries after his immediate successors, 
his history seems to have been little read except 
by scholars ; he was a great name, not a living 
influence as a teacher or a model. His style, with 
its *' old-fashioned and wilful beauty,"^ repelled, and 
other ideals of history, sharply opposed to his, 
came into fashion. It was not till the first century 
B.C., with the return to Attic models, that the 
interest in his work revived ; and from that time 
we can trace his influence on leading writers ^ down 

^ di.pXo.'iKbu re Kal aiiOades kclWos, Dionysius, irepl <rvv6. 6v. 165. 
^ Dexippus and Procopius are instances. 



IV THUCYDIDES 149 

to one of the latest Byzantine historians, Crito- 
bulus. But this influence was of a superficial kind ; 
it concerned style and phraseology ; it was generally 
a mere mechanical imitation.^ And the historians 
whom he would himself have most esteemed were 
not those who came under his own influence. 

1 The servile imitation of Thucydides is ridiculed in Lucian's ttws del 

iaroplav avyypd^eiv ; 



LECTURE V 

THE DEVELOPMENT OF GREEK HISTORIOGRAPHY 
AFTER THUCYDIDES 

§ 1. The generation after Thucydides 

Thucydides had set up a new standard and 
proposed a new model for historical investigation. 
He taught the Greeks to write contemporary- 
political history ; this was the permanent result 
of his work. But the secret of his critical methods 
may be said to have perished with him; it has 
been reserved for modern students fully to appre- 
ciate his critical acumen, and to estimate the 
immense labours which underlay the construction 
of his history but are carefully concealed like the 
foundation stones of a building. Influences came 
into play in the fourth century which drove history 
along other paths than those which he marked out ; 
the best of the principles which his work had 
inculcated did not become canonical ; and his 
historical treatment was not sympathetic under 
the new intellectual constellations. 

The age succeeding his death was perhaps not 
favourable to the composition of political history.^ 

^ This is an observation of von Wilamowitz-MollendoriF. 
150 



LECT.v XENOPHON 151 

The engrossing intellectual interest was then 
political science, and the historical method had 
not been invented. The men who might other- 
wise have shone as historians were engaged in 
speculations on the nature of the state. They 
were eagerly seeking an answer to the speculative 
question : What is the best constitution ? Only 
three historians of note arose in this period ; they 
were more or less under the influence of Thucy- 
dides, but at long intervals behind. 

Of these the only name famihar to posterity is 
Xenophon, who was probably the least meritorious 
of the three. To the circumstance that he is one 
of the very few classical Greek historians whose 
work has survived, he owes a prominence to which 
his qualities do not entitle him.^ In history as in 
philosophy he was a dilettante ; he was as far ' 
from understanding the methods of Thucydides as 
he was from apprehending the ideas of Socrates. 
He had a happy literary talent, and his multifarious 
writings, taken together, render him an interest- 
ing figure in Greek literature. But his mind 
was essentially mediocre, incapable of penetrating 
beneath the surface of things. -If he had lived 
in modem days, he would have been a high- 
class journalist and pamphleteer ; he would have 
made his fortune as a war-correspondent ; and 



^ The preservation of his works is due to the overestimate which was 
formed of him under the Atticistic revival ; he was canonized by Mteraiy 
judges, with Thucydides and Herodotus. Cp. Lucian, irws Set 4, "Every- 
body wants to be a Thucydides, a Herodotus or a Xenophon " (QovKvSiSai 
Kai 'HpSdoTOi Kal Sieyo(puvT€s). 



152 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

would have written the life of some mediocre 
hero of the stamp of Agesilaus. So far as 
history is concerned, his true vocation was to 
write memoirs. The Anabasis is a memoir, and 
it is the most successful of his works. It has the 
defects which memoirs usually have, but it has 
the merits, the freshness, the human interest of 
a personal document. The adventures of the Ten 
Thousand are alive for ever in Xenophon's pages. 

He took up the story of the Peloponnesian war 
where Thucydides had left it, and he carried down 
the history of Greece from that date to the fall 
of the Theban supremacy, in the work which we 
know as the Hellenica. By this work his powers 
as a historian must be judged. Some of its 
characteristics are due to the superficial lessons 
which the author learned from the founder of 
political history. In the first portion of the book^ 
he employed strictly the annalistic plan of Thucy- 
dides. He adopted the device of introducing 
speeches, and the objective method of allowing the 
actors to reveal themselves in their acts and words. 
He does not himself pourtray their characters, as he 
pourtrays Cyrus and the generals in the Anabasis. 
But he never goes down below the surface of 
events ; he never analyses the deeper motives ; and 
he writes with little disguise of his own predilections. 
His history is an apotheosis of Agesilaus ; he does 
not conceal his strong philo-Laconian leanings or 
his hatred of Thebes ; he pointedly ignores Epami- 

1 B. i. and B. ii. to iii. 10. 



V XENOPHON 153 

nondas. His ideas about historical happenings were 
those of the average, conventional Athenian ; and 
he ascribes the fall of the Spartan supremacy to 
divine nemesis, avenging the treacherous occupa- 
tion of the Theban citadel. He cannot resist the 
commonplace attraction of commonplace moralis- 
ing ; he tells anecdotes which his austere prede- 
cessor would have disdained; but he has learned 
from Thucydides to keep to the matter in hand. 

Other works of Xenophon had more influence 
than the Hellenica, on subsequent historiography ; 
or, as it would probably be safer to say, reflected an 
interest which was to become not only permanent 
in literature but a conspicuous feature in history. 
I am referring to biography. Interest, deliberate 
and serious interest, in individual personalities, had 
been awakened by the sophistic illumination ; and 
Euripides probably did as much as any single man 
to heighten and deepen it. A new branch of 
literature, biography, emerged ; and the word ySto?, 
life, acquired a new meaning, charged with the 
whole contents of a man's actions and character. 
Biography was founded by Isoc^ates and the pupils 
of Socrates. The ea^j^lkSt^Hiography we possess is 
the Evagoras of Isocrates, and it is to this model ' 
that we owe the second, the Agesilaus of Xeno- 
phon^ In other works of Isocrates also there are 
biographical sketches, and perhaps the portj-aits in 
the Anabasis were due to his influence.^ We can 



^ They remind us of the character-portraits of the dead Argive leaders 
in the Suppliants of Euripides (861 sqq.). 



154 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

see too that the original personality of Socrates, 
which made a deep impression on his disciples, was 
effective in helping to establish this kind of litera- 
ture ; most of them used their pens ; and the 
incidental portraiture of Plato, and the Memoirs 
of Xenophon, which are not a Life, have their 
significance for the rise of biography. I have not 
to follow its further development or to show how 
it was stimulated by the Peripatetic school.^ 
As a literary art ancient biography reached its 
highest perfection in Plutarch's gallery of great 
men. That series is invaluable to us, because the 
author consulted many books which are now lost ; 
but he was not a historian ; his interest was ethical. 
What we are here concerned to note is that, 
after Xenophon and Isocrates, historians generally 
considered sketches of character and biographical 
facts to be part of their business. It was a feature 
which was flagrantly liable to abuse, and often 
led to irrelevancies, which would have shocked 
Thucydides. But although, in practice, ancient 
character-portraits tended to be conventional and 
uninstructive, it was in principle an important 
advance to recognise that the analysis of character 
and personality has historical value, and cannot 
be confined within the limits which Thucydides 
had allowed. 

The continuation of Thucydides was taken up 
by another writer who seems to have had a truer 

^ For these remarks on the rise of biography I have used F. Leo's 
admirable work Die ffriechisch-romische Biographie (1901). 



V CRATIPPUS 155 

calling than Xenophon to exercise the historian's 
trade. Cratippus was one of the obscurest figures . 
in literature, and till a few months ago we had not 
even a fragment to indicate the character of his 
work. But a passage of Plutarch might suggest 
that his history possessed more than ordinary 
merit. "If there were no men of action," Plutarch 
observes,^ " there would be no historians. Abolish 
Pericles, Phormio, Nicias, and the rest, and you 
eliminate Thucydides. Abolish Alcibiades, Thra- 
sybulus, and Con on, and you abolish Cratippus." 
Here Cratippus is singled out as the leading 
historian of Athens for the years subsequent to the 
termination of Thucydides, and as one whose loss 
would be acknowledged to be an impoverishment 
of historical literature. The passage also leads us 
to infer that Cratippus carried his continuation as 
far as the naval victory of Cnidus, 394 B.C., which 
enabled Athens to win back an independent and 
eminent position in the Greek world. Egypt, 
which has yielded so many invaluable relics of 
classical literature to the indefatigable explorations 
of the eminent Oxford scholars, Grenfell and 
Hunt, has recently enriched us with a treasure, 
which, I have little doubt, is a portion of the 
work of Cratippus. This substantial fragment 
covers a part of the year 396 B.C. and most of the 
year 395, so that it may represent more than 
a twentieth part of the whole history. Some 
eminent scholars claim for it the authorship of 

^ De Olor. Athen. ad iuit. (ed. Bernardakis, ii. p. 455). 



156 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

Theopompus ; but the weight of evidence, in my 
opinion, is entirely against that theory ; while 
there is nothing inconsistent with the authorship 
of Cratippus (the only other admissible claimant ^), 
which was advocated by Blass. As no relics of 
the work of Cratippus have been preserved in 
literature, we have no direct positive evidence for 
the identification. The case rests (1) on the argu- 
ment by exclusion ; the claims made for other 
candidates cannot be reconciled with the character 
of the fragment; (2) on the circumstance that 
the few things we know about Cratippus corre- 
spond to the indications of the new text. The 
narrative bears the stamp of an original composition 
by a contemporary (like that of Thucydides, and 

^ The only other ; for the claim put forward for Androtion by G. de Sanctis 
(see Bibliography) is obviously out of court. It is enough to say here 
that the narrative of the campaigns of Agesilaus could not possibly have 
appeared in Androtion's Attic history. — The case against Theopompus, 
who is considered to be the author by Wilamowitz-MoUendorff and 
E. Meyer, has been stated impartially by Grenfell and Hunt, who, 
however, incline to this theory, and has been forcibly presented by 
De Sanctis. I will not go over the argxunents which they have put so 
well. But I would emphasize that the few positive indications of contact 
between the papyrus and fragments of Theopompus may be otherwise 
accounted for (as Theopompus would naturally have used Cratippus) ; 
that what we know about the life of Theopompus, unsatisfactory as it is, 
renders it highly unlikely that he wrote his Hellenica before 350 B.C. ; and 
that the hypothesis — to which the advocates of his authorship are forced 
to resort — that the Hellenica was entirely diflPerent in the style of treat- 
ment from the Philippica, is contradicted by a passage of Porphyrins 
(Eusebius, Praep. evang. x. 3, cited by De Sanctis in his tract, p. 9) and 
by the way in which Dionysius (in his appreciation in the Letter to 
Pompeius, 6) associates both works closely together and describes the 
character of his " historiography " without the faintest suggestion that 
the earlier work presented a radical contrast to the later. [Since the 
above was written, papers have appeared by W. A. Gohgher, in the 
English Historical Review, April 1908, and W. Rhys Roberts, in the 
Classical Review, Jime 1908, arguing against the Theopompus theory.] 



V CRATIPPUS 157 

even more so than Xenophon's Hellenica), not 
compiled from books. We can see that it was 
written without knowledge of Xenophon's work. 
The lower limit of its date can hardly be later 
than about 350 b.c.^ Now Cratippus, we know, 
was a younger contemporary of Thucydides,^ and 
his literary activity must have been subsequent 
to the death of Thucydides {c. 396 B.C.) whose 
work he continued ; so that chronology as well as 
subject accords with the hypothesis of his author- 
ship. There are no speeches, and one of the 
things we know about Cratippus is that he 
disapproved of the speeches in Thucydides and 
considered the absence of them in the last Book 
a proof that Thucydides had come to regard them 
as undesirable.^ The narrative is lucid and simple, 
unadorned by rhetorical phrases and free from 
didactic commonplaces. It is also extremely dull ; 
but it would be illegitimate to judge from this 
particular section that the work as a whole could 
not have evoked the praise implied by Plutarch. 
If nothing were left to us of Thucydides but, 
say, the last thirty chapters of the third Book, 
with the tedious account of the Acarnanian opera- 
tions of Demosthenes, what a dull writer we should 
esteem him. We can see that the author was not 
given to passing personal criticisms ; no hard words 
are said of any one ; a slight approbation is accorded 
to an act of Conon ; and one much -mutilated 

^ E. M. Walker thinks it was written before the end of the Pho- 
cian war. 

2 Dionysius, J)e Thucydide, 16. * lb. 



158 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

passage contains apparently a characteristic of a 
statesman, whose identity can hardly be deter- 
mined.^ This evidence does not enable us to 
decide whether Cratippus adopted the objective 
method of Thucydides in regard to the personalities 
of the historical actors. But in other matters at 
least he condescended to his readers. He explains 
the relations and actions of political parties ; he 
traces the growth of anti-Spartan feeling in Greece; 
and of the constitution of Boeotia he gives as clear 
an account as could be desired in a handbook, an 
account which shows us that we were ignorant of its 
real nature. The general impression I gain from 
the fragment is that if the work had survived 
it would occupy a distinctly higher place than the 
Hellenica of Xenophon, though the author did 
not possess Xenophon's technical knowledge of 
warfare. 

The discovery of Grenfell and Hunt has added 
to our knowledge of facts, but for our present 
purpose its interest lies in showing on what lines 
the writing of contemporary history, founded by 
Thucydides, might have developed in the hands 
of men, not endowed with his brain-power and 
originality, but competent and diligent, if it had 
not been diverted from an independent path by 
forces which I will presently notice. 

1 The passage, on which nothing persuasive has been suggested, is in 
col. X., where oi yap ibcnrep o[l(?)Tr\eTaTOL rwv BvlpaaTevdvTCov and 87][fj,o]TiK<i}T 
are the shght clues. Could it possibly be Dionysius of Syracuse ? That 
Sparta was interested in some of his proceedings described by Diodorus, 
xiv. 7. 8, might conceivably have led to a mention of him here and a 
digression on his policy. 



V PHILISTUS 159 

The influence of Thucydides was probably more 
marked in another contemporary historian, who 
moved in another part of tlie world and had a 
different horizon, Philistus of Syracuse. Like 
Thucydides, he had experience of public afl*airs, 
and suffered exile, and lived to be recalled. He 
did not confine himself to contemporary history, 
as Thucydides did, for he related the story of 
Sicily from the very beginning down to the time 
of his own youth — he had been an eye-witness 
of the Athenian expedition. But his more impor- 
tant work was the history of the two tyrants 
Dionysius, father and son, a record of events in 
which he had himself played an active part both 
as politician and military commander. He enjoyed 
the posthumous distinction of being the only 
historian whose works followed Alexander, along 
with the great poets, to Further Asia, and, as 
Freeman says, "the reason of the choice is plain 
enough. Nowhere could Alexander find reading 
more to his taste than in the history of Dionysius, 
the first man who carried on war on a scale and 
after a fashion at all approaching to his own."^ 
Philistus made Thucydides his model,^ not by a 
slavish imitation of his style, but rather in temper 
and method, and we may suspect that of all 
Greek historians he was most Thucydidean. He 

^ History of Sicily, iii. 63. 

2 Dionysius, irepi /ufi-qcrews, 426 (Usener and Radermacher, p. 208) ; 
Cicero, De Orat. ii. 13. The differences in style between Thucydides 
and Philistus are explained by Dionysius, Letter to Pompey, 5. The 
style of Philistus was tediously uniform. 



160 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

is thus appraised by Cicero, who, though he lived 
in a day when other styles of history were in 
fashion, had a keen literary sense. "Philistus," 
he writes to his brother Quintus, who was engaged 
in reading the Sicilian author, is "a writer of 
the first rank, pithy, sagacious, concise, almost 
a miniature Thucydides." ^ Cicero's portrait sug- 
gests that Philistus displayed Thucydidean qualities 
beyond conciseness and the faculty of keeping 
strictly to the point; and this we know from 
other evidence. The court of the old fox (veterator) 
Dionysius the Elder, of whom he was an intimate 
confidant before his disgrace, was a school of 
statecraft and political casuistry, in which the 
imitator of Thucydides could well learn to study 
political phenomena* from the non-moral attitude 
of his exemplar. But the mere fact that Philistus 
undertook to write in detail the early history of 
Sicily raises a presumption that he was less 
sceptical than the Athenian ; and as a matter of 
fact he did not disdain to record wonders and 
omens, such as the appearance of a swarm of bees 
alighting on the mane of a horse, which was taken 
to presignify the reign of Dionysius.^ 

§ 2. The influence of rhetoric 

During the period in which these three his- 
torians, Philistus, Cratippus, and Xenophon, wrote, 

^ " Capitalis creber acutus brevis paene pusillus Thucydides " : ad Q. 
fr. ii. 11. I give the renderings of Tyrrell and Purser, vol. ii. ed. 2, p. 136. 
2 Cicero, J>iv. 1. 33=fr. 48. Cp. fr. 57. 



V ISOCRATES 161 

the educated Greek world was succumbing to the 
spell of two influences, towards which Thucydides 
had been detached and independent. I refer to 
rhetoric and philosophy. You are all familiar with 
the immense influence which Isocrates exerted on 
literature and education. He was not a man of 
genius, yet at no age, perhaps, can we find a single 
man who in this sphere held such a magisterial 
position. Greeks from every part of the world 
repaired to his school at Athens, and his rules for 
style were canonical. I need not illustrate this, 
but will go on to show how he affected the develop- 
ment of historiography and especially through two 
eminent admirers, Ephorus and Theopompus. 

And first of all I may point out how the 
political view of which Isocrates was the most 
conspicuous exponent affected history. The rise 
of Macedon in the middle of the fourth century, 
and the gradual fulfilment of the aspiration for 
the union of Greece, under Macedonian direction, 
brought to the front what was virtually a new 
conception of Hellenic history. Hitherto, history 
had been either sectional, the histories of particular 
states or groups, or had been concerned with 
particular episodes, such as the joint efforts of the 
Greek states against the Persian or inter-Hellenic 
wars. But the idea of Greek unity preached by 
Isocrates, and taking the special form of unity under 
Macedonian leadership against Persia, reacted upon 
history, and no fewer than three works were 
written in the days of Philip and Alexander, 

M 



162 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

which were inspired by the idea of the unity of 
Greek history. Two of them have vanished, 
leaving not a trace except the mere record of 
their existence. One was by Zoilus, whose name 
is better remembered for his carping criticisms 
of Homer which earned him the nickname of 
Homer o-mastiXi Homer's scourge.^ The other was 
by his pupil Anaximenes, who was one of the 
teachers of Alexander. Both these historians were 
submerged in oblivion by the success of the third, 
Ephorus of Cyme. He is said to have been a 
pupil of Isocrates, but I do not think that this is 
established.^ The work to which he devoted his 
life, beginning with the mythical origins of Greece 
and embracing the barbarian peoples with which 
the Greeks came into contact, was probably 
intended to terminate with the year 334, when 
Alexander crossed into Asia, but only reached 
as far as 356, in consequence of the author's 
death. It became and remained one of the 
standard works of antiquity, and established what 
has been aptly described as " the vulgate of Greek 
history." It is usual to designate this book, which, 
although it has perished, is inwoven in the narra- 
tives of our later authorities, so that we know a 
good deal about it indirectly, as the first universal 
history ; and so it is described by Polybius. But 
it is important to discriminate the precise sense in 
which we can admit this description. We must 

^ His work came down to Philip's death. 
^ Cp. Schwartz, art. " Ephoros," in Pauly-Wissowa. 



V EPHORUS 163 

always remember that the Greeks had never 
formed a nation ; they were never united even 
in an all-embracing federation ; they had no 
national history in the proper sense of the word. 
The bond of community among them was the 
general homogeneity or unity of their civilisation. 
Now the novelty of the work of Ephorus lay in 
this, that, recognising this unity of culture which 
contained potentialities of a real Hellenic nation, 
he brought together the particular histories of all 
Greek-speaking communities, and thus produced 
what might be called a quasi -national history. 
But it was distinctly a history of Greece, Hellenica^ 
not a history of the world ; non- Greek peoples 
only came in so far as they were connected with 
Greek history ; and the title " universal " can be 
applied, not on the ground that the author, like 
Herodotus, comprised portions of non-Greek his- 
tory, but in the limited sense that all the Greeks 
were embraced. To some extent the chronicles 
of Hellanicus had been an anticipation of this 
idea of Ephorus and his contemporaries. 

It became the fashion at this time to divide 
large works into books. The history of Ephorus 
consisted of twenty-nine Books, of which each was 
a unity in itself and had a preface of its own.^ 
Thus it was not constructed on the annalistic 



1 A thirtieth Book was added by the author's son, coming down to the 
siege of Perinthus, 340-339 b.c. The treatment must have been consider- 
ably more summary than in the work of Ephorus himself, whose last ten 
Books seem to have covered not more than thirty-four years (since 390 b.c. 
was treated in Book xix.). See Schwartz, op. cit. pp. 5, 6. 



164 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

method. The author seems to have had a wide 
acquaintance with the whole range of historical 
and geographical literature, and he did not copy 
uncritically. He was fully conscious of the value 
of first-hand information, and we may note his 
acute observation, wondering how far he applied 
it, that in the history of modern times the most 
detailed accounts are the most credible, but for 
ancient history those who profess to know most 
particulars are the least worthy of belief. His 
critical principles led him formally to throw over 
the purely mythical period and begin with the 
return of the Heracleidae ; but he did not carry 
out consistently this counsel of wisdom ; in the 
course of his narrative he introduced myths and 
indulged in the crude methods of rationalising 
which had been initiated by the lonians. 

I cannot enter into a detailed account of the 
work of Ephorus, and must be content just to 
mention characteristics for which the influence of 
Isocrates is responsible. Among them may be 
noticed the interruption of the narrative by moral- 
ising platitudes ; the introduction of elaborate 
Isocratean speeches, even when an army was 
facing the enemy ; and the passion for panegyrics. 
These features, and his conventional battle-scenes, 
which conformed more or less to a model scheme, 
manifest the same tendency to sacrifice truth to 
effect. History is becoming epideictic, like ora- 
tory and poetry, and desires to show off. And this 
is what is meant by saying that historiography was 



V THEOPOMPUS 165 

drawn under the pernicious influence of rhetoric. 
One does not mean by that, the cultivation of 
a clear, agreeable, and rhythmical style ; one means 
the tendency to seek first of all and almost at any 
cost what may be called rhetorical effects. 

The other famous historian of the Isocratean 
school, Theopompus, continued the work of Thucy- 
dides in his Hellenica, which covered the same 
period as Cratippus and for which he must have 
derived his material mainly from older works, such 
as those of Cratippus himself and Xenophon. 
His more important effort was the Philippica, a 
history of Greek affairs in the time of Philip, and 
here he was in the full sense an original contem- 
porary writer.^ He, too, was affected by the 
national idea of Isocrates ; he saw in the Mace- 
donian power a unifying principle, and he made 
it the pivot of his contemporary history. But it 
is notable that he called that history, not Mace- 
donica, but Philippica. It was a new thing to 
treat a period as "the age of Philip." 

He was probably the most interesting historian 
of the fourth century. But some have even 
pronounced him truly great, worthy to rank near 
Thucydides. The evidence is sufficient to disprove 
such a claim.^ The Isocratean features which were 
common to him with Ephorus are decisive. And 
if we observe that he was more concerned with 



^ This work (which was not pubhshed before 324 B.C., cp. frags. 108, 
334) consisted of fifty-eight Books. 

^ See Wachsmuth, Einleitung, 537 sqq. 



166 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

the private morality of men of action than with 
their political or military capacity, that he served 
up miracles and fables, and related a figment of his 
own invention concerning the imaginary land of 
Merope beyond the ocean, where the golden age 
is still a reality,^ we may see that any comparison 
with Thucydides is almost ludicrously inappro- 
priate. He seems to have been a man of restless 
vanity, endowed with what we might call an epi- 
deictic temper. While Ephorus devoted his life 
to study without personal ambition, Theopompus 
travelled about, eager to cut a figure in the world, 
like Gorgias and others of the early sophists. He 
had a "temper," revealed in his writings and 
infusing a spice, which was lacking in the flavour- 
less works of Ephorus and Cratippus. He was 
a psychological analyst, and he was more inclined 
to be censorious than panegyrical. The critic 
Dionysius says that his great aim was to dive 
into the profundities of the human soul and 
discover the secret wickedness almost invariably 
lurking beneath the semblance of virtue.^ 

In judging these new tendencies to which 
history succumbed under the Isocratean regime, we 
must bear in mind that they responded to the taste 
of the public which Isocrates did much to educate. 
In old days Homer and the epic poets satisfied the 

1 He said expressly that in myths he would outdo Herodotus, Ctesias, 
and oi to, 'IvdiKa a-vyypd^j/avTes. Strabo, i. 2. 35. 

2 Letter to Pompey, 6, 7. " I suppose," adds Dionysius, " that the 
mythical judges in Hades conduct their trials of the dead with the 
punctual severity of Theopompus. " 



V EPHORUS AND THEOPOMPUS 167 

requirements of a large public. Herodotus similarly 
appealed to public taste and public interest. Thucy- 
dides had a different object in view. He formed 
a standard of historical truth, and deliberately 
renounced the idea of making his book a popular 
success. We may conjecture with high prob- 
ability that the works of his successors Cratippus 
and Philistus had a very small and select circle of 
readers. Ephorus and Theopompus determined to 
win the public ear. It was not enough to write ; 
they wanted to be read. From this point of view 
they represented a reversion to the days before 
Thucydides. But they had a different audience to 
please from that which listened to Herodotus, and 
they captured votes by accommodating history to 
the rhetorical effects for which the public cared. 
This was a natural instinct of self-preservation. 
At all events, the craving for the achievement of 
popular success dominated historiography hence- ' 
forward ; the exceptions to the rule are few. 

Under Isocrates, Athens had been the educa- 
tional and literary centre of Greece. The primacy 
passed away from her in the greater Greece created 
through the conquests of Alexander ; she was no 
longer the arbitress of taste or the leader of intel- 
lectual fashion. In the field of history, Timaeus of 
Tauromenium illustrates the transition from Attic 
to Hellenistic literature. He lived through vast 
political changes. Born two years before Chaeronea, 
he survived the outbreak of the First Punic war. 
Driven from Sicily by Agathocles for political 



168 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

reasons in his youth, he found a new home at 
Athens, where he devoted the rest of his long life ^ 
to a history of Sicily and Italy. He not only 
ransacked literature, but travelled for the purpose 
of his work, sparing neither time nor money to 
gain accurate information about the ill -known 
western nations, Iberians, Celts, and Ligurians. 
He made a special investigation of chronology, and 
was the first to introduce into Greek historio- 
graphy the clumsy, inconvenient method of 
reckoning time by the Olympiac years. His work 
(in thirty-three Books) came down to 320 b.c., but 
he continued it in a history of Agathocles, and in 
a later book which reached to 264 B.C. and in- 
cluded the campaigns of Pyrrhus. Timaeus was 
not only used extensively by subsequent historians, 
especially by Diodorus, but his history was recog- 
nised as an authoritative storehouse of information 
by the scholars and poets of Alexandria, such as 
Apollonius, Lycophron, Callimachus, and Erato- 
sthenes. The material furnished by this means has 
enabled Geffcken to restore the general construc- 
tion of the first two Books of his chief work, deal- 
ing with the mythical history and geography of 
Sicily and Italy. For us his merit lies in his in- 
dustrious collection of ethnographical facts and 
local legends, material which is still of value ; but 
this merit would never have sufficed to secure him 
the popularity and authority which he enjoyed for 
many generations after his death, if his history had 

1 340-256 B.C. ; exiled 317 B.C. 



V TIMAEUS 169 

not possessed other features which we should mark 
as his weak points. When he came to Athens he 
studied rhetoric under a pupil of Isocrates, and his 
work had characteristics which we expect from the 
Isocratean school, such as speeches packed with 
commonplaces, and the conventional administration 
of praise and blame. He had also weaknesses of 
his own. He was a thorough pedant, without 
sense of proportion or the faculty to discriminate 
weighty from trivial things ; interested in discon- 
nected details ; fond of fables and marvels. He 
was also something of a mystic. He sought to 
show, for instance, that to every sinner punish- 
ment, unmistakable as such, was meted out, and 
that coincidences of date had a transcendent signi- 
ficance ; he was ever on the watch for the revelation 
of mysterious or daemonic influences in historical 
events. Again,his history of the contemporaryperiod 
must have been far from impartial. His extrava- 
gant admiration of Timoleon was the counterpart 
of his failure to recognise any but the worst qualities 
of Agathocles, whom he hated on account of his 
own banishment, which had embittered his mind. 

Living in the Attic atmosphere and trained in 
Isocratean rhetoric, we should expect to findTimaeus 
conforming to the canons of Attic style. But it 
appears that he adopted a new kind of writing 
which bade farewell to the traditions of Attic taste. 
It is impossible to decide whether he struck out 
this new way for himself, or came under the 
influence of Hegesias of Magnesia, who is always 



170 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

designated as the founder of the famous school of 
style which came to be known as the Asianic. As 
we do not know the precise dates of the life of 
Hegesias, we cannot say whether he and Timaeus 
were independent of each other. The literary 
parentage of this new style is to be sought in the 
prose of the elder sophists, like Gorgias and Alci- 
damas ; but it outdid anything that Gorgias in his 
most frigid moments had been tempted to essay. 
It produces the impression of a bacchic revel of 
rhythms and verbal effects. This Asianic move- 
ment triumphed ; the general public lost the power 
of appreciating Attic measure and Attic sanity ; 
and the new style was predominant for two 
hundred years. Nor did it disappear when the 
reaction came and Attic models again came into 
fashion. On the contrary, as Nor den has shown, 
the two styles, the archaic and the modern, con- 
tended for mastery throughout the ages of the 
Roman Empire. For instance, in the fourth 
century a.d. we have a great archaic rhetorician, 
Libanius, thrilling Antioch with his eloquence, 
while a great modern sophist, Himerius, was teach- 
ing the art of style at Athens. 

Of the modern style, in its early or Asianic 
period, we have very few specimens, but we know 
that it comprised two distinct kinds — the pretty 
style and the bombastic style. The bombastic 
suited the taste of grandiose Hellenistic princes, 
and it so happens that the one considerable example 
we possess of it is a long inscription of Antiochus 



V HEGESIAS 171 

of Commagene (discovered in 1890), in which the 
King describes his achievements. It is, as Norden 
says, a prose dithyramb. But the other, the pretty 
style, was the more popular and more important ; 
it was the style in which Timaeus experimented 
and which Hegesias established. It is not easy to 
reproduce the effect of this style in a modern 
language, because it depends so much on rhythm ; 
but in order to show the sort of thing you would 
find in the most popular works of the lost litera- 
ture of the third and second centuries b.c, I will 
quote a passage of Hegesias, who wrote a history 
of Alexander the Great. The historian makes the 
following comment, shall I call it ? or dirge, on that 
monarch's destruction of Thebes : ^ 

In rasing to earth Thebes^ O Alexander, 

Thine hand a deed has done. 

Such as Zeus would do 

Were he to cast the moon utterly 

Out from yon heaven's section ; 

For the sun as a fitting symbol I keep for Athens. 

Verily these cities twain were visual orbs of Hellas ; 

So that now for the one of the pair in pain I travail. 

1 Fr. 2 (ed. Miiller, Scr. rer. Alexandri Magni, p. 140) : 

Sfioiov TreTToi-rjKas 'A\i^av8pe 

ws cLv el 6 Ze!>s 

iK TTJs Kar' ovpavhv fiepiSos 

iK^dXoL Tr]v a€M)V7}v. 

Tov yap ■^\lov vTro\eiTro/j,ai rah 'Ad'^vais, 

dvo yap adrac TroXeis 

TTJS 'EWdSos ^(Tav 6\j/eis. 

dib Kal irepl tt;s erepas dyuviQ vvv. 

6 fiev yap eh avrCjv ocpdaX/mbs 7] Qrj^aiwv 

iKK^KO-rrrat. 7r6Xts. 

See the rhythmical analysis in Norden, Griechische Kunstprosa, i. 136. 



172 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

For Hellas hath lost half her vision, one eye knocked out, 
Even the Theban town. 

This means in plain language : Athens and 
Thebes are in Greece what the sun and moon are 
in the sky ; or they may be likened to the two 
eyes of Greece, and Alexander in destroying 
Thebes has deprived Greece of one eye. I have 
made an attempt to imitate the rhythm, though it 
is indeed impossible to catch the effect in another 
language, or perhaps to appreciate it even in the 
Greek. But the example will illustrate the 
poetical character of the Asianic style. Is not 
this passage what one might look for in the 
chorus of a third-rate historical tragedy ? 

The popularity which Timaeus enjoyed for a 
couple of centuries mirrors the public taste, and he 
would hardly have enjoyed it if he had adhered to 
the canons of Attic style, which drew a sharp line 
between poetry and prose. But there was another 
school of historical art bidding for public favour in 
the days of Timaeus. It was initiated by Duris 
of Samos, a pupil of Theophrastus. He became, 
through some stroke of luck, tyrant of Samos, and 
he wrote a history of Greece from 370 B.C. to 281, 
a biography of Agathocles, and a chronicle of his 
native city. He declared war on what I may call 
the conventional school of Ephorus and Theo- 
pompus, asserting that these writers failed to excite 
the pleasure which history, differently treated, is 
capable of affording. They lacked, he said, 
mimesis. Mimesis is the nearest Greek equivalent 



V DURIS 173 

of " realism " ; and we shall not be far from the 
mark if we say that what Duris demanded was 
realism, and if we call his school the realistic 
school. Duris was intensely interested in the 
theatre ; he wrote books on tragedy and the 
history of art ; and it was tliis interest in drama 
that inspired him with the idea that historians 
should aim at producing the same kinds of effect 
as dramatists. He required, for instance, that 
they should introduce their personages dressed in 
the costumes appropriate to the time and circum- 
stances. But his chief point of insistence was that 
the feelings of the readers should be moved and 
harrowed by highly wrought pathetic scenes, con- 
jured up by the writer's imagination ; while they 
were also to be entertained by anecdotes and 
gossip and amorous stories. He achieved a success 
with the public, and naturally his success was 
followed up by others. For example, Phylarchus, 
who wrote an important history of the years 272- 
220 B.C., is blamed by Polybius as "feminine" 
because he aimed at moving his readers to tears.^ 
That was the influence of Duris. 

There was a good deal to be said for the instinct 
of Duris in his reaction against conventionalism. 
The power of realising and vividly describing scenes 
of the past is a high merit in a historical writer, 
provided he has the material necessary for con- 
structing a true picture. But this proviso is 

^ We must remember that Polybius was disposed to be unfavourable to 
Phylarchus as a partisan of Cleomenes. 



174 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

sure to be overlooked when the writer's first con- 
sideration is not truth, but effect. And so it was 
with Duris. His school, like the conventionalists, 
subordinated history in the Thucydidean sense to 
literary art. The conventionalists appealed to 
taste, the realists appealed also to the emotions. 
The former edified, the latter excited. But for both 
alike history was simply a branch of rhetoric. 

We may regret this corruption, as we call it, of 
history. But it is more to the purpose to under- 
stand the Greek point of view. It is not easy 
for us to realise the importance which the art of 
rhetoric possessed for the Greeks, as a purveyor of 
aesthetic pleasure. Indeed, the history of Greek 
rhetoric testifies, perhaps as impressively as the 
history of Greek plastic, to the large part which 
aesthetic pleasure played in Greek life. For the 
later Greeks, the declamations of rhetoricians, 
which we find intolerably tedious to read, had as 
intense an aesthetic value as the Homeric poems 
for their remote ancestors, and were listened to 
with as eagerly attentive and as critical ears. 
People went to hear a rhetorical display just as we 
go to hear a symphony. And this interest lasted 
down to late Graeco-Roman times. Greek prose 
was always an art in as full a sense as the poetry 
from which it sprang, regulated by principles and 
canons, which have no counterpart in modern 
languages, even in French, and required prolonged 
study and practice. And rhetoric came to fulfil 
for Greek audiences the same role which had been 



V HISTORY AS LIGHT READING 175 

once fulfilled by the epics. Just as the historians, or 
as we should say mythologers, of the Homeric age 
were epic poets, so the later historians were rhetori- 
cians. If the historian were not trained in the school 
of the rhetorician he would have had few readers. 

Again, history and geography were the great 
field from which light reading was provided for the 
educated public. The later historians helped to 
satisfy the same need of entertainment which had • 
formerly been met by the tales of the epic poets 
or the historical anecdotes of the sixth and fifth 
centuries. There was no special literature yet of 
romances and novels, and the functions of our 
modern novelists were to a great extent fulfilled by 
the historians. History had to answer the purpose 
now answered by fiction, and it is not surprising if 
it tended to partake of the nature of fiction. 

The knowledge of strange lands won by the 
conquests of Alexander the Great stimulated the 
appetite for marvels and provided abundant food. 
It was not necessary to imagine, as Theopom- 
pus did, a land of Merope ; there was now an 
actual background and there were actual adven- 
tures ; history could appear without excuse as 
romance, and romance could mask as history. 
The sober and veracious relations of Alexander's 
achievements, the political Memoir of Aristobulus 
and the military Memoir of Ptolemy, fell dead ; 
and four centuries elapsed before the excellent 
Arrian composed the first history of the Mace- 
donian hero's conquests that was based on these 



176 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

and some other trustworthy sources,^ with a 
rigorous rejection of the literature which was 
written tt^o? o')(\.ov koI Oiarpov, not only, I am afraid, 
as we say " for the gallery," but for the stalls too. 
The great popular success was won by Cleitarchus, 
a rhetor of Colophon,^ who made the most of the 
possibilities of his theme and captured his public by 
fantastic descriptions of the gorgeous East. This 
quasi-historical work became the standard book on 
the subject, and seems to have exerted a deep 
influence on the traditional history of Alexander. 

But while such romances captivated the public, 
those plain veracious reports of Ptolemy, Aristo- 
bulus, and Nearchus have an important place in 
the development of historiography. They founded 
a new branch of historical literature,^ which in the 
next generations was represented by the Memoirs 
of Pyrrhus and of Aratus, to be succeeded in Roman 
days by the Commentaries of Julius Caesar, the 
Memoirs of Corbulo, and Trajan's history of his 
Dacian wars. The Commentaries of Caesar ful- 
filled indeed, in a most subtle way, the function 
of political pamphlets, but the plain businesslike, 
unadorned relation has its literary parentage in the 
memoirs of the generals of Alexander. And it is 



1 Especially the work of Nearchus on his voyage in the Indian 
Ocean. 

2 He wrote about the end of the fourth century. From the criticisms 
of Longinus and Demetrius, it appears that his style was marked by 
features which heralded the Asianic school. 

3 We may indeed compare parts of Xenophon's Anabasis. And the 
work of Nearchus may remind us of the report which Scylax made for 
Darius. 



V HIERONYMUS 177 

not, I think, unreasonable to conjecture that these 
memoirs were the model or inspiration of an excep- 
tional work of this period, which fulfilled, as it 
would appear, the demands which Thucydides 
made on historiography. Hieronymus of Cardia, 
a soldier and statesman, who had served under 
Eumenes and Antigonus Gonatas, wrote a history 
of the Diadochi and Epigoni from the death of 
Alexander to about 266 B.C. His sole concern 
seems to have been to record facts accurately ; he 
used official despatches, and in general he told only 
what he knew of his own knowledge or from 
credible information. But his style was careless ; 
he disdained rhetoric. The Greeks would not read 
what did not gratify their aesthetic sense ; and a 
work like that of Hieronymus had no more chance 
in competition with Duris than the Memoir of 
Ptolemy against the sensational and rhetorical 
story of Cleitarchus. Speculating on what we 
casually learn about this lost book, we may 
suppose that if it had survived we should regard 
Hieronymus as a third in a triumvirate of Greek 
historians, along with Thucydides and Polybius. 

We saw in the first lectures how the Persian 
conquest of Asia Minor and invasion of Greece 
played a determining part in the rise of history. 
Similarly, the Greek conquest of the Persian 
empire had a decisive influence on its develop- 
ment. I have pointed out some of the ways in 
which this second great stimulus from the Orient 
operated. Just as it was in consequence of 

N 



178 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

the destruction of Miletus and the Persian war 
that the intellectual primacy in Greece passed 
from Ionia to Athens, so it was a consequence of 
the expansion of Hellas by Alexander that the 
primacy passed away from Athens to Alexandria 
and other places — passed back, we might say, to 
the East ; and this affected history as well as other 
branches of literature. Again, the opening up of the 
distant countries of Asia stimulated and ministered 
to the romantic history which gratified the popular 
appetite for sensation. On the other hand, the 
reports and "blue-books" of Alexander's generals 
founded a new kind of history which eschewed 
rhetoric, addressed no appeal to the public, and had 
very few exponents. Another result of Alexander's 
work was the rise of the idea of the oecumene, — the 
realisation of the inhabited world as a whole of 
which account must be taken.^ This idea had 
indeed no immediate influence on history. We 
can trace its influence in the Stoic philosophy, and 
it gave rise to the conception of the Romans that 
their dominion was potentially conterminous with 
the orhis terrarum.. As a historical principle, it 
then began to become effective, as we can see in 
the universal histories of the first century B.C., and 
it prepared the way for the Christian conception 
of world-history. 

' Compare J. Kaerst, Die antike Idee der Oekumene in ihrer politischen 
tmd kuUurellen Bedeutung, 1903. 



V POLITICAL LITERATURE 179 

§ 3. The influence of philosophy and the rise 
of antiquarianism 

I have traced the influence of rhetoric on 
history ; we must now consider the influence of 
philosophy. In the first half of the fourth century, 
a period of intense practical, as well as theoretical, 
interest in problems of government and social 
organization, we find, beside Isocrates the sophist, 
who wrote for the hour, Plato the philosopher, 
who wrote for the ages. Different as they were, 
they both represented from different sides the same 
interest in political speculation, and both alike gave 
it an ethical direction, the effects of which were 
permanent. Both these masters, the man of genius 
and the man of talent — the programmes of the one 
and the ideals of the other — set historical tasks 
to the next generation. While Isocrates set in 
motion Theopompus, Ephorus, and Androtion, the 
greatest pupil of Plato found it necessary, in 
investigating political philosophy, to trace the his- 
tories of the political constitutions of Hellenic states. 

We should understand many points in the 
political speculation of Plato as well as in the 
political pamphlets of Isocrates if we possessed 
the mass of political literature which inundated 
Athens during the period of the Peloponnesian 
war. Of that literature we have one early speci- 
men in the anonymous book on the Athenian 
Constitution. We have only a few fragments of the 
publications of Antiphon, Thrasymachus, and Critias, 



180 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

the most distinguished names. Some papyrus frag- 
ments of the Apologia of Antiphon have been pub- 
lished the other day by Nicole, but, welcome though 
they are, they do not amount to very much.^ 

It has been happily observed by Wilamowitz ^ 
that these political pamphlets, of which the book 
of Stesimbrotus was one of the first, were the 
prose successors of the Elegies of Solon and 
Theognis. The most effective and important 
flysheets emanated from the men who were dis- 
satisfied with the democracy and desired to substi- 
tute oligarchy or polity ; they were dealing with 
burning questions and they did not spare persons. 
The book of Stesimbrotus, which seems to have 
been entitled Concerning Themistocles, Thucydides, 
and Pericles^ had struck the personal note. The 
Athenian history of the fifth century was per- 
verted by these writers into a history of dema- 
gogues ; and this perversion had a decisive influence 
on Athenian thinkers of the following century. 
The pupils of Socrates were only too ready to 
adopt a view which held up to obloquy the 
democracy which had taken the life of their 
master. We have the scheme of the Athenian 
demagogues in Plato's Gorgias, in the Politikos of 
Antisthenes, in the Dialogues of Aeschines, in the 
Philippika of Theopompus, in the Athenian Con- 
stitution of Aristotle. It was somewhat as if the 

^ UApoJogie d' Antiphon, ou X670S 7re/)2 /ieraa-Taffeios, 1907 (Geneva-Bale). 

2 The same scholar has made it probable that one portion of the 
Panegyric of Isocrates was aimed against the pamphlet of an Ionian who 
(c. 404 B.C.) wrote against the Athenian supremacy and in favour of 
Sparta. 



V POLITICAL LITERATURE 181 

sources of the American history of the nineteenth 
century were lost, and a reactionary pubUcist 
wrote a book to make out that a series of dema- 
gogic Presidents was the key to the history of 
the United States. 

This literature, contemporary with Thucydides, 
must have had a considerable effect in creatino; an 
interest in Athenian history. It corrupted history, 
but it also quickened it. It was the object, for 
instance, of Theramenes and his followers to prove 
that polity, the form of government which they 
desired, was not an innovation but the true and 
original Athenian constitution, the Trdrpio'i ttoXl- 
rela,^ and that the existing democracy was a 
perversion which had been generated and fostered 
in the interests of demagogues. The historical 
question, what was the nature of the Trar/jto? 
iroKireia and the Solonian reform, thus became a 
question of burning political interest. We may 
illustrate it by the controversies, not yet extinct, 
as to the nature of the Reformation in England, 
between Church parties which, in the interests of 

^ To the literature on this subject belong the crv/x^ovXevrLKos of Thrasy- 
machus (411b.c.) ; the pamphlet from which Aristotle derived much material 
for his 'A^. tt. ; then, later (403 b.c), Lysias, Trepl toO /jltj /caraXCo-ai rrjc nrdTpiov 
iroKiTelav 'A.drjV7]<n. [The puzzle of the irepl trdXiTeias, vulgarly ascribed to 
Herodes Atticus, has been discussed in a minute and careful study by 
E. Drerup, 1908 (Studlen zur Geschichte und Kultur des Altertums, ii. 1, 
Paderborn). His solution is very interesting. From a variety of indica- 
tions he concludes that it was written in the summer of 404 b.c. by an 
Athenian belonging to the party of Theramenes, and is a political 
pamphlet concerning the Athenian politics of the hour, Thessaly, the 
nominal subject, being merely a disguise. So an Irish patriot might put 
a plea for Home Rule in the mouth of a Bohemian. If Drerup is right, 
his further inference that the " speech " of Thrasymachus vwep Aapi- 
caiwv was a brochure of the same sort seems probable.] 



182 ANCIENT GllEEK HISTORIANS lect. 

their own ecclesiastical views, place different 
interpretations upon historical events. 

Aristotle's Constitution of Athens may itself be 
regarded from one point of view as belonging to 
the political literature of the fourth century. To 
describe it as a pamphlet ^ is as absurd as it would 
be so to describe the work of Herodotus. Its 
main purpose was scientific ; but the author was 
deeply interested in the politics of the day, and his 
book had an intentional bearing on the contem- 
porary situation.^ It was due to his own views as 
a politician, and not to his curiosity as a historian, 
that he used as authorities flysheet hterature, 
especially a polemical pamphlet dating from the 
last years of the fifth century and expressing the 
anti- democratic conception of Athenian history 
which prevailed in the circle of Theramenes. 

But the Constitution of Athens is only one of 
158 Greek constitutions and some not Greek, 
which were compiled by Aristotle or under his 
direction. Their purpose was to supply actual 
material for a scientific study of political pheno- 
mena. And thus Aristotle possesses the great 
significance that he was the founder of constitu- 
tional history, the precursor of Waitz and Stubbs. 
The Constitution of Athens, the only one of the 
collection we possess, was the one most likely to 
be affected by Aristotle's political prejudices. Its 
weaknesses are evident. It consists of two parts — 
a sketch of the constitutional changes to the end 

^ As Nissen has done. ^ Compare Bauer, p. 274. 



V ARISTOTLE 183 

of the fifth century, and a description of the exist- 
ing constitution. His main thread in the former 
was the local history of Athens as described by Attic 
chroniclers who came after Hellanicus ; ^ just as his 
main guides for other states were probably the local 
histories which had been industriously consulted by 
Ephorus. So far, so good ; and he also displayed 
historical instinct in using the poems of Solon for 
his account of the economic conditions of that 
statesman's time. But he completely neglected 
the material on which a modern historian would 
base his investigation, the stones and the archives. 
And it is clear that he did not comprehend the 
working of the constitution in the fifth century ; 
his critical faculty did not resist the spell of the 
polemical literature of the extraordinarily clever 
publicists who had invented their own version of 
Attic history. When he has recorded the over- 
throw of the Council of the Areopagus, instead of 
pointing out that the actual power and government 
were in the hands of the Council of Five Hundred, 
he intimates that the conduct of the state rested 
entirely with Pericles. The truth is that Aristotle 

^ One of the important results of the discovery of the 'M-qvaLuv ILoKi- 
reia is the light gained for the lost historians of Athens who stood on the 
shoulders of HeUanicus, and who formed a principal source of Aristotle. 
It is notable that some at least of these chroniclers were religious 
exigetai rCov iraTplwv, who are the nearest analogy at Athens to the 
pontifices of Rome. Cp. Wilamowitz, Aristoteles unci Allien, i. 280 sqq. 
We know the names of Cleidemus, Melanthius, Phanodemus (? Anti- 
cleides) ; Androtion is more than a name. The series was continued by 
Demon and closed by Philochorus, an exegetis, the last and greatest, 
whose work eclipsed its predecessors. The recovery of Philochorus 
would mean a greater addition to our historical knowledge than the 
'AdTjvalcav HoKirela. Some new fragments are contained in the Commen- 
tary of Didymus on the Philippics of Demosthenes. 



184 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

seems to have reflected very little on the subject, 
or rather to have confined his reflexions within very 
narrowly drawn lines. The formalism of his con- 
ception is most evident in the way in which he 
treats, or fails to treat, the Athenian empire. To 
a modern student, who should undertake to write 
a constitutional history of Athens, one of the most 
important problems would be to examine how the 
democracy governed the empire and how the 
empire reacted on it. Aristotle dismisses the 
empire in about four lines (c. 24). Moreover, 
although he has traced the constitutional changes 
in relation to the political crises which brought 
them about, he has, in general, his eye merely on 
the dead machinery ; he tells us the names of the 
parts, but he does not show how the machine 
worked. Even when we come to the democracy 
of the fourth century, we get only a full account 
of the official organization and the formal pro- 
cedure ; no effort is made to gain an insight into 
the political efficiency of the institutions. It is 
doubtful whether even here he consulted the laws 
themselves, or rather used an analysis written by 
somebody else.^ And if in this historical treatise 
he fails to show the actual working of the consti- 
tution and to explain the unwritten Staatsrecht, 
his scientific treatise, the Politics, does not supply 
this want. 

Plato troubled himself little with history, but 
it is not improbable that one of his speculations 

' See Wilamowitz, op. cit. i. c, 7. 



V PLATO 185 

suggested the idea of the first history of civilisa- 
tion. In the Laws, where he descends to lower 
heights, nearer to the actual conditions of terres- 
trial society, Plato has sketched a reconstruction 
of the development of the human race. It is 
governed by the idea of cataclysms, such as 
deluges or pestilences which wiped out the human 
race, leaving only a remnant, which had to begin 
at the very beginning and weave civilisation, like 
the web of Penelope, all over again. The latest of 
these periodic cataclysms was a deluge, and the 
few survivors who had gained safety on the tops 
of high hills found themselves without the means 
of travelling and without arts ; the metals had 
disappeared and there were no means of felling 
timber. " The desolation of these primitive men 
would create in them a feeling of affection and 
friendship towards one another ; and they would 
have no occasion to fight for their subsistence ; for 
they would have a pasture in abundance " ; also 
abundance of clothing, bedding, and dwellings, and 
utensils ; so that they were not very poor. And 
they were not rich, as there was no gold or silver. 
But "the community which has neither poverty 
nor riches will always have the noblest principles ; 
there is no insolence or injustice, nor, again, are 
there any contentions or envyings among them." ^ 
Plato draws here the picture of an age which is 
ethically golden ; although he does not use the 

1 Laws, 678-9, transl. Jowett. The cycle of degenerate states in 
Bepuhlic viii. is a sequence in thought, not in time. 



186 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

expression. He then sketches the patriarchal 
government of primitive societies, appealing to 
Homer's description of the Cyclopes ; the rise of 
agriculture and of city -life ; the beginnings of 
legislation which became necessary when men who 
had different laws in their separate life came to live 
together. He shows how this gathering into large 
communities suspended patriarchal rule and brought 
about a monarchical or aristocratic government. 

Up to this point we suppose that we are reviewing 
the general development of mankind throughout 
the whole earth. Then suddenly, by a sort of 
legerdemain, the philosopher changes this universal 
scene to the plain of Troy, and continues the 
imaginary record from the foundation of Ilion. The 
rest is a curious commentary on the history of 
Greece. It turns on the idea that the Heracleidae 
missed a great opportunity. The object of the 
Dorian institutions which they introduced was, 
Plato alleges, to protect the entire Hellenic race 
against the barbarians, and, if they had only legis- 
lated with more far-sighted wisdom, they might 
have secured a permanent union or confederacy of 
the Hellenic world, strong to resist all assaults of 
the barbarians. As history, this is absurd ; the 
interest lies in Plato's reflexion of the national 
Hellenic idea which was preached by Isocrates. 
Nor indeed does Plato intend it to be taken more 
literally than the previous imaginary reconstruc- 
tion of the progress of man from his primeval 
conditions. 



V DICAEARCHUS 187 

This slight sketch, which represents the primitive 
age as ethically golden, but materially rudimentary, 
must, I fancy, have been present to the mind of 
Dicaearchus when he decided to compose the 
earliest Culturgeschichte or history of general civil- 
isation, his Bto9 'EX\a8o9 in which, starting from 
conditions like those indicated by Plato, he traced 
the progress of Greece in public and private insti- 
tutions and in the arts. It is remarkable how the 
speculations of the Greeks on primitive civilisation 
were bounded by that tradition of a decline from a 
golden age, which Hesiod expressed in his scheme 
of the Five Ages. 

But if Dicaearchus found his text in Plato, his 
work was a characteristic product of the Peripatetic 
school to which he belonged. It was the merit of 
that school to promote specialism, and it produced 
a considerable historical literature on aU kinds of 
special subjects, such as the history of philosophy, 
the history of drama, the biographies of sculptors. 
Demetrius of Phaleron played an active part in 
establishing in the Greek world the Peripatetic idea 
of collecting and classifying facts of every order. 
For it was largely due to his stimulus and influence, 
after he retired from Athens to Egypt, that under 
the auspices of Ptolemy I. books were collected at 
Alexandria which formed the nucleus of the two 
great libraries formally founded by Ptolemy 11.^ 
Political history indeed was not much written by 
the savants of Alexandria, whose great achievements 

^ Susemihl, i. 6. 



188 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

were in the sphere of philology ; but the antiquarian 
tastes which found their fullest satisfaction there, 
and afterwards at Pergamon also, in the shadow of 
large libraries, were introduced by the Peripatetic 
movement, and did not fail to affect historio- 
graphy. We can notice this influence in the work 
of Timaeus, who, though he was thoroughly incap- 
able of philosophical ideas and made scurrilous 
attacks on Aristotle, shared with the Aristotelian 
school the passion for collecting facts of all kinds, 
and was so trivial in its indulgence that he was 
called an " old rag woman " {ypaoavWeKrpLa). 

The creation of antiquarian study is one of the 
numerous precious services of the Greeks to the 
progress of human culture. Its distinction is that, 
apparently and in its immediate aspect, it is dis- 
interested. The Greeks described it as 'n-oXvirpay- 
IxoavvT], attending to what is not one's business, a 
singularly felicitous phrase for a sphere which has 
no relation to human life. The Roman word for 
antiquarianism had a similar significance : curiositas, 
superfluous care for what is practically unimportant, 
or, in fact, the love of useless knowledge. But 
although curiositas came to be an instinct in men 
who could not have assigned any reason of utility 
for their pursuits, it must be remembered that it 
sprang from a certain side of the general philoso- 
phical theory of Aristotle, and, thus having a place 
in a system, had originally a justification outside 
itself. It may be called useless in a narrow sense 
of the term, but from another point of view, as I 



V ANTIQUARIAN ISM 189 

will show in a subsequent lecture, it has a human 
value and is therefore ultimately not disinterested. ' 

Although the ancient antiquarians tended to be 
rather learned than critical, and in criticism to be 
rather minute and finical than luminous, there were 
brilliant exceptions ; such as Eratosthenes, the 
greatest and most original geographer of the ancient 
world. His studies in physical science helped him 
to prosecute his antiquarian researches with fresh- 
ness of insight. I would, in particular, point out 
his attitude to Homer. One of the most serious 
impediments blocking the way to a scientific 
examination of early Greece was the orthodox 
belief in Homer's omniscience and infallibility — a 
belief which survived the attacks of Ionian philoso- 
phers and the irony of Thucydides. Eratosthenes 
boldly asserted the principle that the critic in study- 
ing Homer must remember that the poet's know- 
ledge was limited by the conditions of his age, which 
was a comparatively ignorant age.^ This was an 
important step in historical criticism. 

Ancient antiquarians did not work out principles 
of method, nor did they, beyond the collection of 
libraries, provide facilities for research, like the 
bibliographies and innumerable works of reference 
which are compiled for the convenience of modern 
students. It is somewhat surprising that archives 
were not systematically transcribed, and official 
documents collected. The idea was not unknown. 
Craterus, who seems to have been a contemporary 

1 Strabo, vii. 3, 6 ; cp, also 1. 23-25. 



190 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect.v 

of Theophrastus, compiled a corpus of the Attic 
decrees of the fifth century, arranged in chrono- 
logical order. The traveller, Polemon of Ilion, was 
such a diligent copyist of inscriptions that he earned 
the name of stone-rapper {stelokopas). Among the 
Romans, Mucianus, the friend of the Emperor 
Vespasian, collected and edited a large corpus of 
official documents, probably including reports of the 
proceedings of the Senate {acta senatus) during the 
last age of the Republic.^ As this collection included 
reports of public speeches by leading orators and 
statesmen, the motive of Mucianus in compiling it 
may have been an interest in oratory rather than in 
history. Such labours were in any case exceptional. 
Greece did not create scientific philology any 
more than scientific history. But the movement 
set on foot by the Peripatetic school was invaluable, 
both for preserving the records, and exploring the 
recesses, of the past ; and however uncritical or 
crude the methods of ancient antiquarians may 
appear to us, they represent a prominent stage in 
the advance of knowledge. But while their dis- 
interested passion for research affected the recon- 
struction of past history, contemporary history 
was composed by men who subordinated truth to 
rhetorical effect. There were few exceptions, con- 
spicuously Hieronymus, whom I have mentioned, 
and Polybius, to whom the next lecture will be 
devoted. 

1 Tacitus, Dial. 37. 



LECTURE VI 



POLYBIUS 



The life of Polybius covered about the first eighty 
years of the second century B.C. {c. 198-117 B.C.) — 
the period of the great political process which linked 
together the destinies of Greece and Rome. He 
was born in the Hellenistic world, a noble repre- 
sentative of its civilisation, to become the herald 
of the new Graeco-Roman world into which he 
witnessed the Hellenistic system passing. You 
will remember that having played a public part in 
the politics of the Achaean League of which his 
father Lycortas was then the leading statesman, 
and having served as a commander of cavalry, he 
had been taken with other hostages, after the 
battle of Pydna (168 B.C.), to Rome, where he 
was placed in the house of the victorious general 
Aemilius PauUus. There he enjoyed the intimate 
society of Scipio Aemilianus, and had exceptionally 
good opportunities of gaining a first-hand know- 
ledge of Roman affairs and of studying the char- 
acter of the governing class and the working of the 
constitution. There he became reconciled to the 
fate of his country. He lived sixteen years at 
191 



192 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

Rome before he was allowed to return to Greece, 
and during that time he conceived the idea of his 
work and wrote a considerable part of it (at least 
fifteen Books). His original design was to relate 
the history of the advance of Roman conquest, 
through a period of fifty- three years from the eve 
of the Second Punic war (220 B.C.) to the Roman 
conquest of Macedonia (168 B.C.). He explains 
very fully why he chose his starting-point. There 
broke out almost at the same moment three 
great conflicts : the war of Rome with Carthage, 
the war of the Leagues in Greece (in which the 
Achaeans and Philip were ranged against the 
Aetolians), and the war in the East between 
Antiochus and Ptolemy Philopator. Up to that 
epoch, events happening in the various quarters 
of the world were unconnected and did not bear 
upon each other either in their purposes or in their 
issues. But from this time Italian and African 
affairs begin to come into relation with Asiatic 
and Greek affairs, and history begins to assume 
the form, not of strewn disiecta membra, but of a 
single organic body {o-cofiaroetBi] ^). 

But, while Poly hi us marks this date as the 
proper beginning of his work, he goes back farther 
in a long introduction, filling two Books, in which 
he sketches the earlier history of the relations of 
Rome with Carthage, including the First Punic 



^ i. 3. 4. This unity does not become clear till after the defeat of 
Carthage ; but the Eastern events during the Second Punic war went to 
determine the subsequent intervention of Rome. 



VI POLYBIUS 193 

war and the previous history of the Achaean 
League. Thus, so far as the lands of the Western 
Mediterranean are concerned, his history began 
where Timaeus had left off, as he expressly notes.^ 

He signalises the motif of his work in imposing 
phrases. *' Our own times have witnessed a 
miracle, and it consists in this. Fortune moved 
almost all the affairs of the world towards one 
quarter and constrained all things to tend to one 
and the same goal. And so it is the special note 
of my work to bring under one purview for my 
readers the means and the manipulations which 
fortune employed for this end. This idea was 
my principal motive and stimulus. It was an 
additional reason that in our time no one had 
attempted a universal history."^ 

Subsequent events, the fall of Carthage and the 
annexation of Greece in 146 b.c., led Polybius to 
extend his plan and fix this later year as the term 
of his history. In its augmented form it reached 
the considerable bulk of forty Books, of which 
only the first five have been preserved completely, 
though of many of the others we possess long 
excerpts. He seems to have finished the com- 
position of the whole work about the year 134, 
but he continued to insert many additions and. 
corrections up to 120 B.C. These supplements are 
often in contradiction with other passages, for he 
died without submitting the book to a systematic 
revision. Indeed, he had allowed the original 

1 i. 5. 1. 2 i_ 4 1, 

o 



194 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

introduction, which expounded the first scheme 
of his history, to remain unchanged, and simply- 
inserted a statement of his revised plan.^ Of the 
later additions the most interesting are those 
which were suggested by the author's visit to 
Spain about 133 b.c.,^ and those which allude to 
the revolutionary movement of the Gracchi. 
Of the latter I shall have something more to 
say. 

1 have observed that the history of Polybius 
follows on to that of Timaeus, and it is to be 
noted that in his chronological arrangement he 
has adopted the awkward reckoning by Olympiads 
which Timaeus introduced, but he supplements it 
by the years of the Roman Consuls and other 
marks of time.^ In the first portion of his work, 
up to the year of Cannae (216 B.C.), he pursues 
continuously the history of each of the various 
states without interruption ; but after that, he 
adopts the annalistic method and synchronizes 
events in different parts of the world under the 
same year. 

^ Old plan i. 1-5 and iii. 1-3 ; new plan iii. 4-6. 

2 It has been shown that in his description of New Carthage Polybius 
was in error as to the orientation. After he had seen the place he 
inserted (x. 11. 4) a correction of current statements as to the circum- 
ference, but left the other errors uncorrected. See Cunz, Polybius, 8 sqq. , 
and Strachan Davidson, Selections, Appendix. 

3 The beginning of the Polybian year, however, did not coincide with 
that of the Olympiad (July), but fell some three months later (c. Oct. 1). 
This division seems to have been determined by the fact that the autumn 
equinox and the beginnings of the official years of the Achaean and 
Aetolian strategoi fell about the same time. See Nissen, Bheinisches 
Museum, 26. 241 sqq. He calls attention to a passage, xii. 11. 1, 
which suggests that Timaeus may have been partly responsible for this 
system. 



VI POLYBIUS 195 

The arrangement of his immense work displays 
conspicuous skill ; but whether the forty Books can 
be reduced to the scheme of a symmetrically 
grouped work of art, like the history of Herodotus, 
is a question which we can hardly answer with 
confidence, considering that of many of the Books 
we possess only a few fragments. Nissen has 
attempted the discovery of a symmetrical plan.^ 
He holds that it was divided into seven parjts, 
each of which contained six Books, except one 
which contained four. These groups, he thinks, 
correspond to definite stages in the development 
of Roman dominion : " The first group," he says, 
" contains the introduction ; the second the cul- 
minating years of the contest between Bome and 
Carthage ; the third begins with the war in Africa, 
and ends with the destruction of the Macedonian 
hegemony ; the fourth traces the history of the 
Boman hegemony, and the fifth its transformation 
into an empire of client states ; the sixth (which 
is the exceptionally small division) forms the tran- 
sition to the last rising of the Mediterranean states 
against Bome, which is the subject of the seventh." 
In support of this design, he points out that three 
Books which are devoted to long digressions — vi. 
on Roman Institutions, xii. on the work of 
Timaeus, xxxiv. on Geography — come each at 
the end of one of these main divisions. Moreover, 
the addition of a fortieth Book, containing a resume 
of the contents, is urged as an argument in favour 

^ i. op. cit. The theory is favourably entertained by Susemihl, ii. 125. 



196 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

of the alleged construction, on the ground that it 
was required to complete the last hexad. The 
theory has a certain plausibility, but we have to 
remember that Polybius changed and enlarged his 
plan in the course of its composition, and I find 
it difficult to believe that, if he had deliberately 
adopted a definite scheme of this kind, he would 
have failed to draw attention to it in the preface 
to his first or third Book. His solicitude that the 
reader should fully grasp his plan and arrange- 
ment is hardly reconcilable with his silence on such 
a leading point. The symmetry is not clearly 
convincing as in the case of Herodotus. 

But whether this incomplete symmetry is due 
to the design of the author or only to the discern- 
ment of an ingenious reader, Polybius has shown 
a fine artistic sense of propriety in fixing the place 
which he chose for his account of the institutions 
of Rome. The third Book concludes with the 
defeat of Cannae, which set the mistress of Italy 
face to face with the prospect of the extinction of 
her power. How was it that, brought to bay, she 
baffled the triumphant invader, recovered Italy, 
and conquered Carthage ? The historian empha- 
sizes the problem. Of course, the measures her 
government adopted after the disaster were wise. 
But a sagacious policy at the last moment would 
not have availed if Rome had not been what she 
was. The explanation lay, Polybius believed, in her 
institutions. And so he interrupts the narrative 
of the Punic war at this point to describe the 



VI POLYBIUS 197 

institutions which saved Rome.^ He has seized 
the instant at which the reader's interest is most 
fully prepared and awake to learn the lessons 
which those institutions have to give. 

Polybius is not less express than Thucydides 
in asserting the principle that accurate representa-- 
tion of facts was the fundamental duty of the 
historian. He lays down that three things are 
requisite for performing such a task as his ; the 
study and criticism of sources ; autopsy, that is, 
personal knowledge of lands and places ; and 
thirdly, political experience. He was himself a 
man of action, and had acquired political and 
military experience before he became a historian, 
so that he fulfilled the third condition ; and he 
was most conscientious in endeavouring to satisfy 
the two other self-imposed requirements. He pos- 
sessed a wide acquaintance with historical litera- 
ture, and criticized the authorities whom he used 
with fearless independence of judgment. He was 
not taken in by "authority," and he declined to 
render unreserved credit to a writer on the ground 
that he was a contemporary or a man of character. 
For instance, he criticizes the views of the Roman 
historian Fabius on the causes of the Punic war. 
** There are some," he observes,^ " who think that 
because he lived at the time and was a iRoman 
senator he should be believed without more ado. 
Whereas I consider his authority high, but not 

^ In Book VI. The intervening Books iv. and v. deal with synchronous 
events in Greece. See iii. 118. ^ iii. 9. 



198 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

absolute or such as to dispense the reader from 
forming his own judgment on the facts them- 
selves." 

Polybius was also a traveller, and he travelled 
for the purpose of historical investigation in 
accordance with his belief that topographical 
autopsy was a primary qualification for writing 
history. He passes severe criticisms on Timaeus, 
who, he says, always *' lived in one place," and on 
Zeno of Rhodes, for the blunders they committed 
through ignorance of geography. He was in- 
timately acquainted with Greece itself;^ his de- 
scription of the battle of Sellasia was censured 
by Delbriick, but has been successfully defended 
by Kromayer. He travelled in Italy and Sicily ; 
he visited Africa in an official capacity ; he went 
with Scipio to Spain, and explored the coast of 
the Atlantic, returning to Italy by Southern Gaul 
and the Alps. 

The historians of whom Polybius seems to have 
most highly approved were Ephorus and Aratus. 
The Memoirs of the Achaean statesman naturally 
appealed to him as an Achaean politician, but also 
because they satisfied his doctrine that history is 
a practical and not an antiquarian study. Written 
by a man of action, whose interests were directly 
practical, they gave the kind of instruction which 
it was the main function of history, in the esteem 
of Polybius, to give. On the other hand, Ephorus 

^ There is indeed, in xvi. 16. 5, a curious statement as to the position 
of Mycenae relative to Corinth. 



VI POLYBIUS 199 

appealed to him as a universal historian, " the first 
and only writer who undertook to write universal 
history."^ Thus Aratus and Ephorus displayed 
severally the two great features of the work of 
Polybius, on which he constantly insists. His 
view of history is pragmatical and it is universal. . 
The word pragmatical ('n-pary/jbariKO';) has been some- 
times misunderstood. By a pragmatical man he 
means a practical politician, and by pragmatical 
history he means history which bears on political ' 
actualities and furnishes practical instruction. In 
an interesting passage he says^ that this kind of 
history has always been useful, but is more than 
ever opportune now, " because in our times science 
and art (i/jLTretpla koX rexvv) have made such great 
advances that theoretical students can deal, as it 
were on methodical principles, with the situations 
that occur." He insisted very strongly on the 
point that, in order to serve such pragmatical uses, 
a mere narrative of events is inadequate, and the 
historian must investigate and explain the causes 
and -4;he inter- connexions. The whole value of 
history, he said, lies in a knowledge of causes. 
Some exponents of Polybius have applied the term 
" pragmatism " to his work, in the particular sense 
that he investigated the causal nexus of events. 
This is a misuse of the word, and is not 
countenanced by his language. " Apodeictic " is 
the term which he uses of his history in so far 

1 V. 33. 

2 ix. 2. 5. This is one of the rare passages in which an ancient writer 
betrays a sense of " progress." 



200 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

as it traces causes.^ His history is pragmatical, 
and because it is pragmatical, it is also apodeictic. 

Now, what does Polybius understand by causes? 
He is careful to enlarge on the distinction between 
cause and beginning {alTia and apxv), and he illus- 
trates it by examples. For instance, while the 
beginning of the Persian war of Alexander the 
Great was his crossing over into Asia, the causes 
are sought by Polybius as far back as the expedi- 
tion of Cyrus and the wars of Agesilaus.^ But 
it cannot be said that he goes very deep into the 
question of historical causes. He conceives causa- 
tion in an external and mechanical way, and he 
does not proceed beyond the idea of simple one- 
sided causation to the idea of reciprocity, or of action 
and reaction, which is often required to express 
adequately the relations of historical phenomena. 

The view of Polybius on causation in general 
is more interesting than his applications of it to 
particular cases. Until he was well on in years 
and had virtually completed his work, he shared 
the popular belief that, apart from the regularly 
operating natural and human causes, a superhuman 
power, which men call Tyche, exerts a control 
over events and diverts them in unexpected ways. 
This popular view had been presented in a quasi- 
philosophical dress by Demetrius of Phaleron, 
whose treatise liepl rvxv: ^ doubtless made a deep 

1 ii. 37. 3 ; cp. iii. 1. 3. 2 ijj, g. 

^ It is not preserved, but its general argument and contents were 
transferred by Plutarch into his Consolation to Apollonius. Consult the 
work of von Scala (see Bibliography). 



VI POLYBIUS 201 

impression on the mind of Polybius, for its 
influence on a number of passages in his work 
has been proved by von Scala. The event of 
167, the fall of the Macedonian monarchy, the 
new step in the resistless advance of the western 
world-power, in whose chariot wheels Polybius 
himself and his country were caught up, might 
well seem a powerful confirmation of the theories 
of the wise man of Phaleron. Though Polybius 
traces the causes of the success of Rome to its 
history and constitution, he writes as follows in 
the preface to the original plan of his work : 
"Fortune has caused the whole world and its 
history to tend towards one purpose — the empire 
of Rome. She continually exercises her power 
in the lives of men and brings about many changes, 
yet never before did she achieve such a labour as 
she has wrought within our memory." ^ Thus the 
Roman conquests produced upon Polybius the 
same impression which the Macedonian conquests 
had produced upon Demetrius. Elsewhere Poly- 
bius quotes the very words which Demetrius had 
used.^ "Fortune, who exhibits her power in 
compassing the unexpected, is even now, I think, 
displaying it to the world, having made the 
Macedonians the inheritors of Persian prosperity. 
She has lent them these blessings, till she forms 
a new resolution on their destiny." In many 
other places, too, Polybius recognises the active 
operation of Fortune, and comments on her 

1 i. 4. 5. 2 xxix. 21. 5-6. 



202 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

instability, her paradoxes, her caprices, quite in 
the tone of Demetrius. 

But there are other passages in which Polybius 
sounds a very different note. Thus he finds fault 
with writers who ascribe public calamities or 
private misfortunes to Fortune and Fate, and 
only allows that when it is impossible or difficult 
for man to discover causes, as in the case of storms 
or droughts, he may in his embarrassment refer 
them to God or Fortune, "but when you can 
discover the cause of an event it is not, in my 
opinion, admissible to impute it to God."^ Before 
you pray for rain, it is wise to look at the barometer. 
Again, he deprecates the practice of ascribing to 
fortune or the gods what is due to a man's ability 
and prudence. These and other similar observa- 
tions are not perhaps ultimately inconsistent with 
the doctrine of Demetrius, but the note is different; 
they show a desire to restrict the operation of the 
external power within as narrow limits as possible. 
But there are other assertions which are directly 
opposed to that doctrine. When he inquires into 
the causes of the power and eminence attained by 
the Achaeans, a people who were not numerous 
and lived in a small country, "it is clear," he 
says,^ " that it would be quite unsuitable to speak 
of Fortune ; that is a cheap explanation ; we must 
rather seek the cause. Without a cause nothing 
can be brought about, whether normal or apparently 
abnormal." When he wrote this, he had reached 

1 xxxvi. 17. 1-4. 2 ji, 38. 5. 



VI POLYBIUS 203 

a point of view diametrically opposed to that 
which he had learned from Demetrius. Further, 
he applied his new doctrine to the empire of 
Rome. If, in the words which 1 quoted a few 
moments ago, he had claimed Rome's successes 
as a supreme illustration of the mysterious dealings 
of Fortune, he now, with equal confidence, re- 
pudiated the theory that Fortune had anything 
to do with the making of Rome's greatness. " It 
was not by fortune, as some of the Greeks think, 
nor causelessly, that the Romans succeeded ; their 
success was quite natural ; it was due to their 
training and discipline ; they aimed at the hegemony 
and government of the world, and they attained 
their purpose." ^ 

Thus it appears that Polybius, having originally 
started with the conception of an extra - natural 
power, directing the world and diverting the 
course of events from its natural path, was led 
by wider experience of life and deeper study of 
history to reduce within narrower and narrower 
bounds the intervention of this deus ex machina, 
until he finally reached the view that it was super- 
fluous for the pragmatical historian. But it would 
be rash to assert that he ultimately embraced a 
theory of pure naturalism. All we can say is 
that he came to entertain the view that nothing 
happens without a natural cause, and the opera- 
tion of Tyche or chance is, in general, an invalid 
assumption. 

1 i. 63. 9. 



204 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

It is probable that Stoicism had something to 
do with his change of view. It is certain that 
he came under the influence of the new school of 
liberal Stoics, through intercourse with Panaetius, 
who, like himself, was an inmate of the house of 
Scipio at Rome. " I remember," says a speaker 
in Cicero's JDe Republican " that you, Scipio, often 
conversed with Panaetius in the presence of Poly- 
bius, two Greeks the most deeply versed in 
politics" {rerum civilium). Polybius did not 
become a Stoic, but he assimilated some Stoic 
ideas, as in his earlier life he had been influenced 
by the Peripatetics. 

In his actual treatment and presentation of 
historical events, the fluctuation in his views on 
this question probably did not make much differ- 
ence. A change in his views as to the freedom 
of the will would have affected his treatment far 
more deeply. I know for myself that on days 
when I am a determinist I look on history in one 
way, and on days when I am an indeterminist, 
in quite another. Polybius was an indeterminist, 
like most Greeks ; he believed in free-will. The 
particular Stoic influences to which he submitted 
did not touch this doctrine. For Panaetius did 
not share the doctrine of Chrysippus and older 
Stoics, that the world is governed by laws of iron 
necessity which exclude free-will. 

We can see the results of his contact with 
Stoicism in the account which Polybius gives of 



VI POLYBIUS 205 

the rise and fall of political constitutions.^ He 
adopts the newer Stoic version of the theory of 
a cyclic succession of forms of government. 
When the human race is swept away (this has 
happened, and may be expected to happen again) 
through deluges, plagues, or famines, and a new 
race takes its place, the work of civilisation has 
to begin afresh ; monarchy is the first form in 
which society constitutes itself; this passes 
through successive corruptions and revolutions 
(tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy) into 
an anarchical democracy which Polybius calls 
cheirocracy, the rule of might ; from which a 
dissolving society can only be rescued by a return 
to monarchy, and then the cycle begins again. 
In the interval between two cataclysms there may 
be any number of such cycles. Polybius accepts 
catastrophic occurrences not as a mere ancient 
tradition or philosophical speculation, but as a 
proved scientific fact.^ 

The theory of a recurring cycle of political 
constitutions which comes from Plato and the 
Stoics is an application of the cyclical theory of 
the world-process which was propounded by early 
philosophers. Such a theory is more or less im- 
plied by Anaximander and Heracleitus, but it was 
clearly formulated, in very definite terms, by the 
Pythagorean school.^ You remember the passage 
in Virgil's Fourth Eclogue where a new Argonautic 

1 In Book VI. 2 vi 5 5 

^ Cp. Gomperz, Griechische Denker, i. 46, 54, 113 sqq. 



206 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

expedition is contemplated and a second Trojan 
war : — 

atque iterum ad Troiam magnus mittetur Achilles. 

That is the cyclical doctrine, and logically it 
applied to small things as well as great. I may 
illustrate it in the vivid manner of the philosopher 
Eudemus. According to the Pythagorean theory, 
some day I shall again with this manuscript in my 
hand stand here in this hall and lecture on 
Polybius, and you each and all will be sitting 
there just as you are this evening ; and every- 
thing else in the world will be just as it is at 
this moment. In other words, the cosmical pro- 
cess consists of exactly recurring cycles, in which 
the minutest occurrences are punctually repeated. 
We do not remember them — if we did, they would 
not be the same. 

But the cyclical doctrine was not, perhaps, 
generally taught in this extreme form.^ Polybius 
does not appear at first to have held even the 
universal validity of the law of growth, bloom, 
and decay. He considered that it holds good of 
simple constitutions, pure monarchy, for instance, 
or pure democracy, but he thought that the setting 
in of decay could be evaded by a judicious mixture 
of constitutional principles. He has submitted to 
a minute analysis the Spartan and the Roman 
systems of government, as eminent examples of 

^ It is interesting to observe that Dionysius {Uepl tQv apxa-io^v p-qropoiv, 2) 
suggests periodicity as an explanation of the Attic renaissance : elVe deov 
TLVOS dp^avTos e'ire cpvffiKrji TrepioSov ttjv apxaifnv rd^tv dvaKVK'ko^a'ris. 



VI POLYBIUS 207 

the union of the three principles of monarchy, 
aristocracy, and democracy, compounded in such 
a way that they balanced one another and mutually 
counteracted the separate tendencies of each to 
degenerate. The Spartans owed the idea of their 
mixed constitution to the happy divination of the 
genius Lycurgus, the Romans attained to theirs 
through the school of experience. In other words, 
the Spartan constitution was an invention, the 
Roman was a growth. From these premisses, 
which are largely untrue, Polybius deduced the 
exceptional permanence of the institutions of 
Sparta and Rome, and evidently thought that 
they defied the law of degeneration. It may be 
noticed that the superiority of a mixed constitution 
was not a new idea. 

In other passages, however, Polybius speaks in 
a different tone. He sacrifices the theory that 
Rome owed everything to her mixed constitution, 
by admitting that her government was aristocratic 
when she reached her greatness in the time of 
the Second Punic war. It was a mechanical and 
wholly inadequate theory, even if the facts on 
which it was based had been correct — even if 
Rome had possessed a constitution in which the 
equilibrium of the three constitutional principles 
was maintained. In abandoning it Polybius was 
forced to recognise that the secret of life did not 
lie in a mechanical adjustment of the parts of the 
state, and to admit that there was no guarantee 
that Rome herself would not decline. But what 



208 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

induced him to abandon it ? Undoubtedly his 
observation of the revolutionary movements in 
the time of the Gracchi. These movements came 
as a great surprise to him ; nothing could have 
seemed to enjoy a more secure stability than the 
fabric of the Roman state in the days when he 
began writing his book. But the Gracchan revolu- 
tion opened his eyes. Its significance was brought 
home to the friend of Scipio by Scipio's assassina- 
tion. These stormy years flashed a lurid light 
on the past, and Polybius could now look back 
with illuminated vision and see in the agrarian 
law of Flaminius (232 B.C.) the beginning of the 
degeneration of the people.^ Without touching 
what he had written before, he introduced into 
his work new paragraphs which meant the sur- 
render of his former belief in the permanence of 
the constitution. He now recognised that Rome, 
too, was destined to decline, and he could con- 
sequently accept unreservedly the principle of 
anacyclosis. Stoic teaching may have gradually 
prepared him for this change of theory ; and 
Scipio assuredly had not been blind to the signs 
of the times. The revolutionary outbreak illus- 
trated the melancholy prediction which he heard 
from the lips of his friend on the ruined site of 
Carthage : — 

eacrerai rjjxap orav iror 6\d)Xr] "IXto? Ipt) 
KoX Upta/jbo^ Kal Xao9 ivfifieXico UpLafioio. 

^ ii. 21. 8. 



VI POLYBIUS 209 

Some time will come the day 

Of doom for Troy divine and Priam's sway, 

And Priam and his folk shall pass away. 

More than an epitaph on Carthage, it was a 
prophecy on Rome. 

Both Polybius and Thucydides, as I have already 
observed, held vv^ith equal conviction that the first 
obligation of a historian is to discover and relate 
facts as they actually occurred, and herein they 
both represented a reaction against the history 
which held the field. Each alike feels that the 
purpose of his work is to be instructive and not 
to be entertaining. Polybius is fully aware that for 
the majority of the reading public his work will 
have no attractions ; ^ it is intended for statesmen, 
not for antiquarians or people who want to be 
amused. Just as Thucydides is conscious that his 
conception of how history should be written is 
opposed to that of Herodotus, so Polybius repudi- 
ates the fashion of historiography which was in 
vogue, and denounces the rhetorical effects or 
exciting sensations of the works which were most 
popular, such as those of Timaeus and Duris. He 
is severe upon Phylarchus for introducing into 
history effects which are appropriate to tragedy.^ 
Phylarchus was always " forcing the note." He was 
ever attempting to arouse the pity and sympathy 
of the readers by pictures of despairing men and 
dishevelled women, children and aged parents, 
embracing, weeping and making loud lamentation, 

1 ix. 1. 2 ii 56. 



210 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

in the extremity of woe. Tragedy and history, says 
Polybius severely, have different objects. The aim 
of tragedy is to move the soul ; but the aim of 
history is to instruct the mind. Again, just as 
Thucydides ignores all the gossiping anecdotes 
which memoir- writers like Ion and Stesimbrotus 
collected, so Polybius condemns writers of a later 
day for retailing what he calls the " vulgar babble 
of a barber's shop " — what we should call the gossip 
of the clubs, or the canards of the daily press.^ 

Polybius then represents a return, though not a 
conscious return, to the principles of Thucydides 
and a reaction against some of the most conspicu- 
ous tendencies which had marked historiography in 
the interval. But Thucydides exercised no direct in- 
fluence upon him, and the extant parts of his work 
indicate that he was not one of the historians with 
whom he was familiar. Polybius has been affected 
by the speculations in political science and by the 
schools of philosophy, no less than by the changes 
in the political world which had come to pass since 
the lifetime of Thucydides. Any one who turns 
from one to the other is struck by the salient con- 
trasts between their methods of treatment. Thucy- 
dides is an artist, Polybius is a teacher. Thucydides, 
as we saw, employs the objective treatment of 
a dramatist, and rarely comes forward himself to 
address directly to the reader brief criticisms or 
explanations. Polybius on the contrary is entirely 

^ iii. 20, 5 KovpeaKTjs Kal iravd-^iJ.ov \a\ias. Compare his criticism on the 
insinuations of Timaeus against Aristotle, xii. 8. 5-6. 



VI POLYBIUS 211 

subjective. He is always on the stage himself, 
criticizing, expounding, emphasizing, making points, 
dotting the is and crossing the ^'s, propounding and 
defending his personal views. Thucydides did all 
his constructive work beforehand, and presents to 
the reader only the syntheses and results. Poly- 
bius takes the reader fully into his confidence, and 
performs all the processes of analysis in his presence. 
Thucydides states in a few sentences the plan of 
his work, indicates in a few hues his principles of 
historiography ; and his rare criticisms on other 
historians are confined to a word or two. Polybius 
devotes pages to an exposition of the scheme of his 
history, at the outset, and reiterates it in another 
place. At the end of his work he gave a chrono- 
logical scheme of the whole plan. He had com- 
menced with the intention of supplying an epitome 
of contents at the beginning of each Book, but 
afterwards preferred to place at the beginning of 
each Olympiad a summary of the events which 
occurred in it.^ He thus showed a kindly solicitude 
that the reader should fully understand the con- 
struction of his work. He goes, at length, into the 
proper principles and methods of history, frequently 
returning to the subject, and he digresses into 
elaborate criticisms of other historians, such as 
Timaeus and Phylarchus, Ephorus and Theo- 
pompus. He is unsparingly didactic and his diffuse 
explanations are often wearisome. This feature, as 
to which he stands in marked contrast to the early 

^ The change was made after Book v. See beginning of Book xi. 



212 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

historians, may partly be set down to the influence 
of popular philosophy, which tended to promote a 
didactic style. We might indeed say that the history 
of Polybius contains the material for a handbook 
of historical method ; and this adds greatly to its 
value for us. 

Like Thucydides and the ancients in general, 
Polybius believed in the eminent significance of the 
individual in history. He reiterates the platitude 
that one mind is more efficacious than a mass 
of men, quoting the saying of Euripides, "One 
wise plan prevails over many hands." ^ He takes 
a deep interest in the characters of the men who 
appear on his scene. On the other hand, he sees 
that there are potent forces at work besides great 
men. A student of the history of Rome, which 
had won her supreme position, unsteered by single 
men of transcendent powers, could not be blind 
to this. Polybius recognises the importance of 
national character. He considers the influence of 
climate upon it, and finds a key to a nation's char- 
acter in its institutions and political life. We have 
seen the importance which he ascribed to the 
mechanism of political constitutions. But he 
had no idea of history as a continuous progress, 
no eye for what we call historical tendencies, no 
notion of the way in which historical changes are 
brought about by the innumerable and almost 
invisible activities of thousands and thousands of 
nameless people. He possessed a knowledge of the 

1 viii. 5. 3 ; i. 35. 3. 



VI POLYBIUS 213 

facts and conditions of his own age, and of the men 
of his own age, to which we could not attain even 
if we had his whole work in our hands. Yet, frag- 
mentary as our knowledge is, we can say with some 
confidence that we have a deeper insight than he 
into the tendencies of his time, and of the time 
immediately preceding, and a clearer comprehension 
of the change through which the Roman state was 
then passing and of the causes at work. He never 
discerned how the new circumstances of Rome 
in the latter half of the third century were altering 
her commercial and economic condition, and were 
already modifying the character of the state. We 
owe our power of divining this to the enlarged 
experience of the human race. 

To return to his treatment of individuals. 
While Thucydides leaves us to form our own 
impressions from their public acts and from the 
words which he makes them say, Polybius, in 
accordance with his method, analyses and discusses 
their qualities. But it is important to observe 
that he does not, like Xenophon in the Anabasis, 
and nearly all modern historians, attempt to draw 
complete portraits of Philip or Hannibal or Scipio, 
or any of the leading persons of his history, but 
condemns on principle such a mode of treatment. 
For, he says, men are inconsistent : they constantly 
act in a manner which belies and contradicts their 
real nature, sometimes under the pressure of friends, 
at others on account of the peculiar complexion of 
the circumstances. It is therefore misleading to 



214 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

characterize a man when he first appears on the 
stage, or to infer his whole character from particular 
acts. The right method is to criticize his actions 
as they occur.^ The same man must be praised as 
well as blamed ; he is changed by vicissitudes of 
affairs ; his conduct, for instance, may become 
better or worse.^ Characters such as that of Philip 
III. of Macedon, which seems to have specially 
attracted him as a problem, impressed him with the 
necessity of adopting this principle ; and in the 
treatment both of Philip and of Hannibal we must 
admire the conscientious fairness of Polybius in 
endeavouring to understand and estimate their 
characters. 

Psychology indeed was a subject on which Poly- 
bius seems to have reflected much. We can see 
his interest in it, for example, in the account which 
he gives of the mental process of learning to read f 
in his observation that in fighting those have 
an advantage who have a stronger will to conquer, 
so that a battle is in a certain measure a contest 
of wills ; ^ in his insistence on the importance of 
personal experience {avToirddeca) ; or in such a remark 
as that change from one kind of activity to another 
is a relief. His psychological ideas have furnished 
material for a treatise to a German scholar. One 
principle must specially be noticed because he 
applies it to his own work : the importance of 

^ On this principle he only draws general portraits of subordinate 
persons who appear but once or twice. The preliminary account of Scipio 
in X. 2 is concerned only with his youth. 

2 xvi. 28. » X. 47. " Fr. 58. 



VI POLYBIUS 215 

connecting the unknown and remote with the known 
and familiar. For instance, he considers it useless 
to mention the names of strange places, which are 
mere sound conveying no meaning, unless they are 
brought into relation with the geographical know- 
ledge which is famihar to the reader.^ He does not 
omit to make observations on the psychology of 
the masses. Their chief characteristics he considers 
to be ignorance and cowardice ; and therefore 
religious feeling is important for them, because they 
cannot endure surprises or face dangers without 
hope from the gods.^ The only use of mythology 
is to preserve the religion of the multitude.^ Poly- 
bius does not hold that religious belief has any 
value for the educated person ; it would be super- 
fluous in a state consisting exclusively of wise men. 
But he certainly did not underrate its importance 
in actual societies. He designates religion as the 
keystone of the Roman state.* 

In general, it may be said that Polybius is 
large-minded in his judgments and aims at scrupu- 
lous fairness. While he applies ethical standards 
to the conduct of public men, his broad study of 
human nature inclines him generally to the more 
indulgent view of their acts. Perhaps no ancient 
writer was more impartial in temper than he, and 
the prejudices which we can detect are exceptions 
to the rule. These prejudices are chiefly to be 
discovered where he deals with the affairs of 
Greece. Here his patriotism has unquestionably 

1 V. 21 ; iii. 36. ^ x. 9. 10. 3 xi. 12. 9. * vi. 56. 6 sqq. 



216 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

coloured his account of Achaean politics, and he is 
distinctly unjust to the Aetolians. The danger of 
such partiality did not escape him. "A good 
man," he says, " should be fond of his friends and 
of his country, he must share in the hates and 
affections of his friends. But when he undertakes 
to write history, he must forget these attachments, 
he must often bestow the highest praises on 
enemies when facts require it, and, on the other 
hand, censure severely his most intimate friends 
when their errors demand such censure."^ Else- 
where,^ in censuring two Rhodian historians (Zeno 
and Antisthenes) for twisting facts to the credit of 
their country, he discusses the question whether a 
historian should allow himself to be influenced by 
patriotic feelings. "Admitting," he says, "that 
historians should lean to their countries, I deny 
that they should make assertions inconsistent with 
facts. We writers must unavoidably fall into 
many errors through ignorance, but if we write 
what is false, for our country's sake or to please 
our friends or to win favour, and measure truth by 
utility, we shall discredit the authority of our 
works and be no better than politicians." The 
indefeasible claim of historical truth cannot be 
more explicitly expressed or emphatically enforced ; 
and the significance of these passages lies in the 
challenge which was thrown down to the prevail- 
ing practice of the rhetorical school of history. 
But Polybius has not absolutely adhered himself 

M. 14. 4. 2 xvi. 14. 



VI POLYBIUS 217 

to his admirable doctrine. He is disposed to make 
their attitude to the Achaean League the measure 
for judging other Greek states. On the other 
hand, he is impartial towards Rome. The justi- 
fication of Roman dominion is the motif of his 
work, and the practical lesson for his fellow- Greeks 
was acquiescence in that dominion. But if he 
fully recognised the great qualities of the Romans, 
his Greek sympathies secured him from being 
blind to their faults. 

Polybius, then, stands out among the few 
ancient writers who understood the meaning and 
recognised the obligation of historical truth and 
impartiality. Belonging to no school, he opposed 
the tendencies of the current historiography of the 
day. But while he protests against straining after 
pathetic effects and such bids for popularity, he 
shows occasionally that he possessed the art of 
telling a moving tale, as in his description of 
Hannibal's passage of the Alps, and he can display 
powers of realism in describing an insurrection at 
Alexandria or the Mercenary war of the Cartha- 
ginians. But there is no attempt at striking word 
pictures or purple passages ; when he is effective, 
he succeeds, like Herodotus, by the simplest means. 
He followed the received usage of inserting 
speeches, and laid stress upon their importance. 
But he held that they should reproduce the tenor 
of what was actually said, and he censures Timaeus 
severely for having invented orations entirely out 
of his own imagination. Some of the speeches 



218 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

have a Polybian flavour, but we are bound to 
believe him that he had always evidence to work 
upon in their construction. 

He was not indifferent to style ; his care is 
shown in his scrupulous avoidance of hiatus. It is 
highly significant that in the Greek versions which 
he made of the Latin texts of the treaties of Rome 
with Carthage he neglected the rules of hiatus, the 
observance of which would have embarrassed or 
harmed the accuracy of the translation. He did 
not, so far as we know, follow literary models. To 
illustrate his diction and vocabulary we must look 
not to belles lettres but to the language of official- 
dom — decrees and despatches — and technical 
treatises on philosophy and science. Yet he had a 
wide acquaintance with literature and the classical 
poets. He quotes lyric poets, Pindar and Simon- 
ides, as well as Euripides. Like all educated Greeks, 
he was familiar with Homer, and the fragments of 
his thirty-fourth Book, which was concerned with 
the geography of the West, show that he was in- 
terested in Homeric criticism. The question was 
debated in ancient, as well as modern, times 
whether there was any real geographical back- 
ground to the adventures of Odysseus. Do the 
islands of the Cyclops, of Circe, of Calypso, do 
Scylla and Charybdis, correspond to actual places 
on the Mediterranean coasts ? Or are they " faery 
lands forlorn," and is it vain to seek their names 
on the traveller's chart ? Eratosthenes held that 
Homer had here created a world of poetical 



VI POLYBIUS 219 

imagination, and that the places are as imaginary 
as the people. "It is useless to look," he said,^ 
"for the scenes of the wanderings of Odysseus. 
You will find those places when you find the man 
who stitched together the bag of the winds." 
Polybius did not agree with this view. He 
accepted the common opinion that the poet's 
geography was realistic, and did not hesitate to 
identify the passage of Scylla and Charybdis with 
the Straits of Messene. The work of M. Victor 
B^rard has at least shown that in principle 
Polybius was right. 

But while rhetoric did not seduce Polybius, he 
could not escape from the philosophical and ethical 
tendencies of his age. A good deal of what I have 
said will have shown that he regarded the applica- 
tion of moral standards and the pronouncement of 
moral judgments as pertinent in history. His 
ethical preoccupation is shown very clearly in his 
study of political constitutions. The causes which 
come into play in bringing about decay and change 
are, according to his exposition, mainly ethical ; he 
ignores political and economical forces. Here 
he is not thinking for himself; he is under the 
sway of the speculations of philosophical schools. 
Thucydides impresses us as more independent and 
freer from the influence of speculative theory in 
his criticism of facts. He was not imposed upon 
by constitutional forms, and never ascribed to 
them the significance which they possessed for 



220 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

Polybius. Any superiorities which Polybius seems 
to enjoy over Thucydides are due to the richer 
experience of two and a half eventful centuries of 
which records had been kept, to the larger stage on 
which Mediterranean history had come to move, 
and to the inspiration of the world-power of Rome 
pointing to a new idea of universal history. 

The positive value of the historical labours of 
Polybius, as a trustworthy source, can hardly be 
appraised too highly. I may quote the judgment 
of Mommsen, who was not attracted towards the 
personality of the author. " His books are like the 
sun, in the field of history ; where they begin, the 
veils of mist, which still enshroud the wars with 
the Samnites and with Pyrrhus, are lifted ; where 
they end, a new and if possible more vexatious 
twilight begins." 

Of that part of the work which was most 
original because he wrote as a contemporary and 
had not to rely entirely on other writers, only frag- 
ments have been preserved, and of the last years 
which saw the destruction of Greek independence 
very scanty fragments indeed. But much of the 
material has passed directly or indirectly into the 
books of later historians ; he became, indeed, for 
the period which he treats the chief ultimate 
source of information. If another Polybius, a 
man of his political experience and his historical 
faculty, had appeared in the next generation, our 
knowledge of the period of the great democratic 
movement, a period so critical for the Roman state 



VI POSEIDONIUS 221 

— from Tiberius Gracchus to the dictatorship of 
Sulla — would have been far clearer than it is. The 
task of continuing Polybius was, however, under- 
taken by a remarkable man of exceptional talent, 
Poseidonius of Apamea {c. 235-151 B.C.), whose 
wide influence as a thinker is becoming more and 
more recognised — recognised even to exaggeration. 
He was a pupil of the Stoic Panaetius ; he taught 
in Rhodes, where Cicero heard his lectures ; he was 
a friend of Pompey, and well known to cultivated 
circles in Rome. He travelled in western Europe, 
and embodied his geographical researches in a book 
On the Ocean, which was much used by Strabo. 
Besides being a philosopher and a geographer, he 
was a mathematician, an astronomer (he wrote a 
book on the size of the sun), a student of natural 
science, a meteorologist. He made an important 
contribution to the study of tides in relation to the 
phases of the moon. He had the encyclopaedic 
interest and the encyclopaedic faculty of an 
Aristotle or a Leibniz. History was only one, 
and not the chief, of his many pursuits. His 
historical work (in fifty-two or perhaps sixty-two 
Books), beginning with 144 B.C. where Polybius 
ended, appears to have come down to 82 B.C. We 
have only a few fragments of it, but it is the source 
of our knowledge of those times — the source from 
which Livy, Diodorus, Appian, Plutarch, and 
Josephus drew. The leanings of Poseidonius were 
somewhat oligarchical, and he was partial to his 
friend Pompey. Like Polybius he was a traveller. 



222 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

and like Polybius he played a part in political life ; 
it was a smaller part, and on the tiny stage of 
Rhodes. He once acted as ambassador of his city 
to Rome. Polybius was first of all a man of 
action ; Poseidonius was first of all a philosopher 
and a savant, and he had a strain of poetical 
imagination and enthusiasm, a certain passion, 
which we do not find in Polybius. It is to be 
feared that for the vagueness of our knowledge on 
some of the important facts of this period Posei- 
donius himself is responsible rather than those who 
compiled from him. His mental attitude was 
certainly different from that of Polybius, and the 
difference does not conduce to confidence in Posei- 
donius. For in philosophy he did not follow the 
sobriety of his master Panaetius ; his Stoicism was 
of a more mystical strain ; in fact, it departed so 
far from the earlier tenets of the sect that it may 
be described as a theology. He believed in the 
man tic art, on which he wrote a treatise, ^ and in 
the significance of dreams ; and he was thus 
disposed to accept what Polybius would have 
rejected as fabulous. On the whole, I think we 
may say that while Poseidonius exercised a wide 
and deep influence on the intellectual life of his 
day, and occupies a considerable place in the 
history of ancient learning, and while his historical 
work was the chief source of the records of his 
time, and its loss is deplorable, he cannot be said 
to have advanced the study of history by new 

1 Used by Cicero in De Divinatione, Book i. 



VI POSEIDONIUS 223 

principles or methods, and in some respects he 
represented a retrogression from Polybius. His 
fragments show that general Culturgesckichte was a 
conspicuous feature of his work ; and he seems to 
have aimed at suggesting a contrast between the 
rude but fresh manners of barbarians like the Gauls 
and Parthians, and the decadent civilisation of 
Egypt and Syria. We cannot form any definite 
idea of his general treatment, but we may say with 
probability that Poseidonius had qualities which 
entitled him to be reckoned among those historians 
to whose works men go, not for rhetoric or senti- 
ment, but for the illumination of the past by 
reasonable thought.^ 

^ Some interesting aspects of the work of Polybius, on which I have 
not been able to touch in this lecture, are brought out in Mahaffy's 
valuable chapter on the historian in Greek Life and Thought. 



LECTURE VII 

THE INFLUENCE OF GREEK ON ROMAN 
HISTORIOGRAPHY 

The political genius of Rome might lead us to 
expect that the Romans would have possessed a 
home-grown historiography of their own, reflecting 
their national character. But Greek influence 
intervened before they had time to discover a 
form of historiography for themselves ; and in 
this, as in all branches of literature, they found 
Greek influence irresistible. Their history was 
moulded by the Greeks ; in its methods and 
principles it is Greek. 

Its birth from Greek history was undisguisedly 
proclaimed by the fact that its founders, aristocrats 
contemporary with the Second Punic war, wrote 
their Roman annals in the Greek tongue. The 
chief of these writers, and the only one of whose 
work we can form any idea, was Q. Fabius Pictor, 
whose book was consulted and respected by 
Polybius. Greek was at that time recognised 
as the language of the educated world ; it was 
the Esperanto of those parts of the universe that 
counted ; and this fact outweighed the strong 



LECT. VII CATO ; SALLUST 225 

national feeling which would have suggested 
Latin. You may remember that Frederick the 
Great wrote his Memoirs in French, and that 
Gibbon at first thought of composing his Decline 
and Fall in that polite and universal idiom. 

To break the tradition required an unconven- 
tional man who carried his national feelings to 
the length of miso-Hellenism and who was deter- 
mined to go his own way, M. Porcius Cato. He 
wrote his history of Rome, the Origines, in his 
native tongue. It expressed his own strongly 
marked personality, and mirrored his prejudices. 
Discarding the annalistic form, he introduced 
freely his own observations and opinions, and in 
fact Uberavit animam suavi. Its significance, for 
our present purpose, is that it was effective in 
breaking the tradition : his successors wrote in 
Latin. 

But the change was only in the vehicle. The 
Romans remained completely under the influence of 
Greek methods and models. The worst tendencies 
of Greek history were exemplified in the Annals of 
Valerius Antias, which came down to the time of 
Sulla. He outdid Graecia mendax in audacious 
falsification ; all claims of truth were sacrificed to 
national vanity. Wachsmuth calls his work *' a his- 
torical romance and of the worst kind." On the 
other hand we have Sallust, who was a younger con- 
temporary. He belongs to a triumvirate of Roman 
historians, in which some think that his true place 
is second, next to Tacitus and above Livy. But 

Q 



226 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

unluckily of his chief book, dealing with a period 
of twelve years, 78-67 b.c., only some speeches 
and letters have survived. His monographs, the 
Jugurtha and the Catiline, enable us to see that 
his work was coloured to the core by a strong 
personality ; it sensitively reflected the deep mis- 
givings and gloomy outlook which the experiences 
of the Roman state in the days of Caesar and 
Pompey suggested to a pessimistic observer. It 
is significant that he was deeply attracted by the 
most original of previous Latin historians, Cato 
the Censor. But the writers who influenced him 
most were Greeks, Thucydides and Poseidonius. 
He came under the spell of Thucydides, but he 
was of too different a nature to imitate him except 
in superficial things. 

Livy was inspired by tne idea of giving to the 
Romans a history of the growth of their nation, 
which in the fuln*»ss of its treatment and the 
magnitude of its scale should be adequate to the 
theme. He rose to the majesty of his subject, 
and triumphantly satisfied the ideal of historio- 
graphy which was popular at the time. The 
gentle and even flow of his style, his clarissimus 
candor and lactea ubertas are irresistible. But he 
had many of the deeply-rooted defects of the 
rhetorical school, though his history is incompar- 
ably superior to that of his Greek contemporary, 
che rhetorician Dionysius of Halicarnassus. He 
• wished to be accurate, but his standard was not 
high and his methods were careless. Livy had 



VII LIVY 227 

no notion of the austere methods of historical 
research pursued by Thucydides and Polybius. 
He entirely disdained the trouble of consulting 
primary sources such as inscriptions or the Ponti- 
fical Acts. In one of the few cases in which he 
refers to an inscription, his attention was called 
to it by the Emperor Augustus, who displayed 
great interest in the progress of the work. He 
did not take to heart the maxim of Polybius that 
personal knowledge of topography is necessary for 
a historian in narrating military events. He did 
not, for instance, take the trouble to visit the scene 
of the Battle of Lake Trasimene, and in his story 
of that action he has jumbled together two incon- 
sistent accounts. On the whole, there is a great 
deal of truth in the Emperor Caligula's criticism 
that he was "wordy and careless," verbosus et 



As the work of Sallust reflected, in its temper, 
the stirring age of the Civil Wars, so Livy's history 
mirrored the calm which settled over the Roman 
world after the triumph of Augustus. He was 
a Court historian, and his work fitted into the 
system of the political ideals of the Emperor. 
With its unimpassioned optimism, it is inevitably 
far less interesting than the writings of his pre- 

^ It is to be noted that Professor Howard has successfully defended 
Livy against the charge that he was at first deceived by the extravagant 
statements of Valerius Antias, and, having afterwards become convinced 
of that writer's untrustworthiness, avenged his own credulity by holding 
him up to obloquy. Howard shows that the evidence is not there, and 
that Livy always used Valerius with caution. See his paper on the 
question, in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, xvii., 1906. 



228 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

decessor, who so mercilessly exposed the corrup- 
tion of the Roman aristocracy, and of his greater 
successor, who painted the dark sides of the 
Imperial regime. Tacitus was not only a writer 
of far stronger individuality than Livy, but also 
a far greater historian. He was more critical, and 
was guided by a higher standard of what historical 
research required. Our distrust in reading him is 
not of his facts or of his use of sources, but of his 
innuendo and his illumination. Haupt said he 
was born to be a tragic poet, and his pages are 
saturated with his personality. The dominant 
note of all he wrote is expressed in those words of 
doom, urgent imperii fata. The historian who 
exercised most influence on him was undoubtedly 
Sallust, whose political and ethical pessimism was 
akin to his own. He outdid Sallust in brevitas 
Sallustiana ; he resembled him too in solemn and 
deadly seriousness ; in his passion for psychological 
analysis. But here he was also affected by the 
tendencies of the rhetorical schools of his own 
time ; there, too, psychological analysis and epi- 
grammatic brevity had come into fashion. Tacitus, 
though an accomplished student of rhetoric, is very 
careful and sparing in the use of rhetorical artifices, 
which he always reserves for the production of 
some definite effect. But in his descriptions of 
battles he sacrifices accuracy to style ; his motive 
for describing them at all was not military, but 
rhetorical, interest. 

It so happens that we have a means of testing 



VII TACITUS 229 

the relations of the speeches which Tacitus has 
introduced, to those actually delivered. A bronze 
tablet of Lyons preserves a considerable portion 
of the harangue w^hich the Emperor Claudius 
addressed to the Senate when he conferred the 
ius honormm on the inhabitants of Gaul. Tacitus 
professes to reproduce this speech. A comparison 
of his version with the original shows that he took 
it as his basis, but remodelled it, rearranging the 
order, adding some new matter, cutting down 
tedious passages, adapting it to his own style, and 
eliminating the Emperor's ungainly mannerisms. 
For instance, Claudius in the middle of his speech 
suddenly addressed himself: "It is high time, 
O Tiberius Caesar Germanicus, to disclose yourself 
to the Senate and show whither your oration 
tends." This eccentric transition does not appear 
in Tacitus. But the general tenor and argument 
are the same. The case is highly instructive as 
exemplifying how the best historians like Tacitus 
and Thucydides constructed their speeches. When 
an original speech had been published, historians 
refrained from reproducing it. The literary canon 
of homogeneity of style, which the Tacitean treat- 
ment of the oration of Claudius illustrates so well, 
forbade them to transcribe it ; and it would have 
been obviously out of place to challenge com- 
parison by a paraphrase. We can prove this rule 
in the case of Livy, who expressly declines to give 
a speech of Cato for the Rhodians, which Cato 
had included in his own history, and in the case of 



230 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

Tacitus, who similarly omits the dying discourse of 
Seneca on the ground that it had been already 
published. Exceptions were only made in favour 
'of very short pieces. For instance, Tacitus repro- 
duces verbally a brief communication of Tiberius 
to the Senate, just as Xenophon reproduced the 
laconic message of a Lacedaemonian admiral. 
Otherwise, the rule which the Roman historians 
inherited from the Greeks was never to reproduce 
documents or speeches in their original form, and 
to avoid reproducing at all such as had been 
published. Suetonius and Cornelius Nepos were 
exceptional in not obeying this rule ; they could 
quote the example of Polybius. 

Sallust had skilfully employed the Thucydidean 
method of exhibiting the motives and personalities 
of historical actors in speeches. But he had not 
confined himself to this method ; he also freely 
pourtrayed characters himself ; for example, his two 
contrasted pictures of Cato and Caesar are famous ; 
and he had freely introduced personal comments of 
his own. Tacitus adopted the dramatic and indirect 
method, but he developed that method with such 
elaborate skill and refinement that it became a new 
thing in his hands. One of the simplest examples 
of his art is the portrait of Augustus, which he 
exhibits reflected in the mirror of men's judgments 
about him. It is managed just as a dramatist 
might make two people of opposite views meet 
in the street and argue over somebody's character, 
in order to show what manner of man he was. 



VII TACITUS 231 

But the chef (Toeuvre of Tacitus is his Tiberius, 
The author had psychologically reconstructed that 
emperor on the assumption that the mainspring 
of his character was dissimulation ; he never dis- 
cusses it as a problem, but simply reveals the man 
in this light, interprets his acts and words in this 
sense, and uses all the devices of innuendo, of 
which he was so subtle a master, to bring it out. 
The Tacitean method is illustrated by contrasting 
the descriptions of Tiberius in Suetonius and 
Velleius Paterculus, who collect together all the 
traits of the Emperor and facts which attest them. 
It is also evident that Tacitus has produced his 
general effect by a limitation of his subject, by 
emphasizing certain sides and omitting others. 
The Aniials are a history of Rome and the crimes 
of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. The wars of the 
period are indeed recorded, but it may be said 
with virtual truth that the book ignores the 
Empire. No reader of Tacitus would come away 
with the smallest conception of the efficiency with 
which the Empire as a whole was administered. 

Tacitus, like Sallust, looked at history from 
an ethical point of view, I mean from the point 
of view of the morality which is valid for the indi- 
vidual. He judged actions by the ideals of virtue 
and nobility ; he was not prepared to take time 
and circumstances into account, nor to acknow- 
ledge that the standard applied to private conduct 
may be inapplicable to public transactions. In 
this respect, he occupied the same ground as the 



232 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

late Lord Acton, whose first principle in reading 
history was the application of the strictest rules 
of private morality to the actions of public men. 
It may be thought by some that this attitude in 
examining the past is somewhat futile. Sociology 
is still in its infancy, and it may be asked. Has 
the time come for verdicts ? Is not Thucydides 
more reasonable, and is not his political analysis 
more instructive, than the ethical criticism of 
Tacitus ? The predominating moral interest is 
of course one of the features which Tacitus shares 
with the rhetorical school. The ethical side had 
been emphasized, without passion, by Greek his- 
torians since the fourth century ; with Tacitus it 
was a question of life and death. 

I have still to refer to an illustrious Latin 
historian who stands altogether apart from the 
rest, in method and style, as well as in his own 
relation to the facts which he records. As a 
clear businesslike narrative of external events, 
told from the inside, by one who had fuller know- 
ledge than any other man, the Commentaries of 
Caesar are a model of excellence. In reading 
them, indeed, we have to remember that it was 
not a purely historical interest that moved the 
writer to assume the historian's part. He had 
political purposes in view. The Memoir of the 
Gallic War was written to show the necessity 
of his actions and to prove or illustrate his com- 
petence. The history of the Civil War, which 
he left unfinished, was designed to shift the blame 



VII CAESAR 233 

from his own shoulders. Thus the works are m a 
certain sense poHtical pamphlets. In the story of 
the conquest of Gaul we cannot control the nar- 
rative ; it is possible that much has been sup- 
pressed ; and Caesar's artless simplicity may have 
been the instrument of most artful misrepresenta- 
tion. Our present concern, however, is not the 
criticism of his facts, but his choice of that 
plain straightforward method of narration, which 
had been introduced by the men who had worked 
in the service of Alexander the Great. Of this 
genus of historical literature, Caesar's Comment- 
aries are the only extant specimen ; we can have 
little doubt that they are the best which antiquity 
produced ; but they were not an original growth 
on Roman soil ; the Memoirs of Pyrrhus and 
Aratus were precedents. It is, however, signifi- 
cant that Caesar regarded his own work as merely 
material for the professional, that is, the rhetorical, 
historian to work up. 

You see then that the most eminent Roman 
historians moved entirely within the limits of 
Greek traditions, in regard to principles and 
methods. For them all, history was, as Cicero 
considered it, a branch of the art of rhetoric. We 
may, indeed, say that from the beginning of the 
Empire the distinction between Greek and Latin 
historians has only a subordinate significance. In 
studying historical literature from the time of 
Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Greek and 
Latin writers must be considered together. 



234 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

Rhetorical history remained in the ascendant, 
but antiquarian history also had some devotees. 
Rome has a distinguished roll of antiquarians to 
point to, such as Varro, Hyginus, Asconius, and 
it was the distinction of Suetonius to have written 
history which aimed simply at the industrious 
collection of facts, without any thought of 
rhetorical effects. His political attitude was 
very similar to that of Tacitus, but in his bio- 
graphies, which (as Leo has shown) are built 
up on a conventional scheme, he keeps his own 
personal views in the background and lets the 
facts speak. 

The development of the Graeco-Roman his- 
toriography under the early Empire, up to the 
time of Theodosius the Great, can now be studied 
in the elaborate work of Peter,^ the special value 
of which consists in treating the Greek and Latin 
historians together, and in showing how the writ- 
ing of history was affected by the Court and by 
the public. He has illustrated abundantly how 
a writer's freedom in treating contemporary history 
was limited by fears and hopes ; and how his scope 
was narrowed by the lack of interest of the public 
of these ages in any contemporary events except 
the scandals of the Court. Exceptions were few. 
We have been accustomed to think of Ammianus 
Marcellinus as the only Latin historian after 
Tacitus whose merits entitle him to a high place. 
Recently a new star has been announced, whom 

^ See Bibliography. 



VII UNIVERSAL HISTORY 235 

Kornemann, the discoverer, has named "the last 
great historian of Rome." This unknown writer 
is said to have suppHed the authors of that am- 
biguous collection of imperial biographies known 
as the Historia Augusta with valuable material. 
Even if we accept the demonstrations, the place 
he holds among Latin historians will not be vacated 
by Ammianus for this anonymous author who 
flourished in the age of the Severi.^ 

I may say, finally, a few words about universal 
history, which became an established form of com- 
position under the Roman Empire. It has often 
been noticed how the cosmopolitan doctrines of 
the Stoics, their creed of the brotherhood of men, 
gave a stimulus to the construction of compre- 
hensive works embracing the annals of the known 
peoples of the world. The value of universal 
history, on the Stoic assumptions, has been stated 
impressively enough by Diodorus of Agyrion. 
"All men," he says, "living, or who once lived, 
belong to the common human family though 
divided from one another by time and space ; and 
the universal historian who aims at bringing them 
all under a common view is a sort of minister of 
divine providence. That providence orders alike 
the stars and the natures of men, throughout the 
cycles of time, allotting to each its proper part ; 
and those who have recorded the history of the 



^ E. Kornemann, Kaiser Hadrian und der letzte grosse Historiker von 
Rom, 1905 ; O. Th. Schulz, Das Kaiserhaus der Anto7iine und der letzte 
Historiker Boms, 1907. 



236 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

world as if it were one town, have, in their 
works, suppHed mankind with a sort of bourse 
for exchanging records of the past." Diodorus 
himself, however, was quite unequal to the task. 
There is no central idea in his work ; there is 
no grasp of lines of development, no discernment 
of interconnexion between the parts of his sub- 
ject, no independent thought of his own. The 
special histories of the various peoples rest side 
by side in the framework of his forty Books 
(was the number suggested by Polybius ?). His 
history is a rhetorical compilation of excerpts 
from older writers which he has paraphrased, and 
its value for us lies in the circumstance that its 
extant portions contain so much of lost writers 
like Ephorus and Poseidonius. 

Far superior in conception and grasp seems to 
have been the lost work of Pompeius Trogus, 
of which we know something from its Epitome 
by Justin. It was a universal history of the 
Hellenic and oriental world. Roman history was 
excluded up to the point at which Greek and 
Eastern peoples came into contact and collision 
with Rome. It has been plausibly conjectured 
that the author omitted Roman history because 
it had been so fully treated by his contemporary, 
Livy. But though its universal character was 
thus limited, it showed a sense of unity and con- 
tinuity, like that of Polybius ; and this was re- 
flected in the title of the work, Philippica, which 
indicated that Macedonian history was, more or 



VII UNIVERSAL HISTORY 237 

less, the guiding or binding thread. Older history 
had culminated in the Macedonian Empire, and 
out of it had developed the great monarchies after 
Alexander. The work was thus an intelligent 
development of Polybian ideas. 

Such reconstructions helped to prepare for the 
new framework into which history was compressed, 
and the new meaning which was given to it, by 
the Christians. They undertook the task of syn- 
chronizing Graeco-Roman with Jewish records, 
and constructing a universal history in theological 
interests.^ The Church could not avoid grappling 
with this problem. Appealing to the civilised 
world, Christianity was forced to take account of 
the past of the non- Hebrew peoples ; making ex- 
traordinary and paradoxical claims for the super- 
lative importance of Jewish history, it had to 
assign to the histories of the Greeks and Romans 
their proper place in the universal scheme. The 
Hebrew Scripture determined the six great ages 
of human history distinguished by Augustine, of 
which the last began with the birth of Christ, and 
would endure — such was the confidence of these 
interpreters of history — to the end of the world. ^ 
The Christian interpretation found the central idea 
of world-history in a religious and not in a political 

^ The Christian world-chronicle was constructed by Sextus Juhus 
Africanus, and then, on the basis of his work, by Eusebius. 

^ The succession of the four great monarchies (Assyrian, Persian, 
Macedonian, and Roman), in which Greek writers had already seen a 
principle of chronological division, was brought into connexion with the 
prophecies of Daniel by Jerome ; and Jerome had no doubt that the 
Roman was the last. 



238 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

phenomenon, and it introduced into historiography 
• a new and pernicious principle. Hitherto history- 
had been perfectly free. Homer had indeed en- 
joyed an excessive authority among the Greeks, 
but belief in Homer was not a religious doctrine, 
and men like Thucydides and Eratosthenes used 
the Homeric poems, just as we do, like any other 
ancient source. It was with imperfect methods 
and inadequate conceptions of the conditions of 
the problem that the Greeks had attempted to 
order the traditions of their own and other races 
into a consistent whole ; but they had worked 
quite freely, guided by reason alone and unfettered 
by dogma. Christian historiography installed the 
superior guidance of an indefeasible authority, the 
divinely inspired tradition of the Jewish records, 
whereby they determined the general frame and 
perspective of the history of the world. This was 
the first appearance of the principle which Car- 
dinal Manning expressed in his famous saying 
that dogma must overcome history, and which 
guides all the historiography of the Ultramontane 
school. 

The Christian reconstruction of history held 
men's minds throughout the Middle Ages, im- 
posed as it was by the highest ecclesiastical 
authority. But though it marked no advance- 
ment of knowledge, though the synthesis was 
simply grotesque, it served to emphasize and in- 
tensify the idea of the unity of mankind which 
had already been preached by the Stoics. With 



VII UNIVERSAL HISTORY 239 

the Stoics this idea had such a vague apphcation 
that it came to Uttle more than an abstract 
theory ; with the Christians it acquired a real 
and intense meaning, inasmuch as they beheved 
all the inhabitants of the earth to have a common 
and vital interest, though they might not know 
it, in the Christian dispensation. In so far as 
it accustomed men to realise the conception of 
a solidarity among all the races of humanity, the 
Christian interpretation assisted in the transition 
from the ancient to the modern conception of 
universal history. For this office a price was 
paid. History submitted to authority, and free 
inquiry was suspended for centuries. 

We may also note that the conception of uni- 
versal history which prevailed in the Middle Ages 
was connected with a general theory sometimes 
described as the first attempt at a philosophy of 
history, in so far as it professed to supply a 
guiding clue and a meaning to the whole de- 
velopment. This theory was worked out by 
Augustine in his De civitate Dei, wherein the 
event to which the whole world moves is 
defined as the victory of the civitas Dei (the 
Church) over the civitas Diaboli (represented by 
the secular kingdoms). This transcendent prin- 
ciple could give little help to a student desiring 
to comprehend the causes of the actual course of 
history ; and the speculation of Augustine no more 
claims to be called a philosophy of history than 
the cyclical theories of the Greeks. But though 



240 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

Geschichtsphilosophie is a modern invention and 
Herder was its founder, the Christian construction 
marks an important stage : for the historical pro- 
cess was for the first time definitely conceived 
as including past and future in a totality which 
must have a meaning. 

In these lectures I hope that I have in some 
measure explained how the Greeks did not suddenly 
create, but rather by a gradual process of criticism 
evolved history, disengaging it from the mythic 
envelope in which fact and fiction were originally 
blended ; how this process corresponded to the 
development of critical thought and scientific 
inquiry, first in Ionia and then at Athens ; how 
the early historians were stimulated by those polit- 
ical events which brought Ionia into close contact 
with the East and by the simultaneous beginnings 
of geographical exploration ; and how history com- 
pleted the first stage of its growth and definitely 
extricated itself from the mythological mists which 
hung about its infancy and childhood, through the 
brilliant inspiration which occurred to the genius 
of Thucydides, the idea of studying critically and 
recording political events as they occurred. We 
saw that the chief events in Greek history re- 
acted upon Greek historiography. The Persian 
conquests led to the investigation of "modern" 
history ; the defeats of Persia by Greece inspired 
Herodotus; the Athenian Empire stimulated Thucy- 
dides ; the rise of the Macedonian power, suggest- 



VII SUMMARY 241 

ing a new possibility of Hellenic unity, suggested 
also the conception of a comprehensive or universal 
history of Hellas ; the Macedonian conquest of the 
East enlarged the range of historical interest ; and, 
finally, the Roman conquests created in the mind 
of Polybius the largest conception of history that 
had yet emerged. We saw too that history was 
intimately affected by the general intellectual move- 
ments of each successive age — by the scepticism 
and science of Ionia, by the great illumination of 
the Sophists, by the literary ideals of Isocrates, by 
the literary reaction of Asia against Attic conven- 
tion, by the Peripatetic philosophy which created 
antiquarian history, and afterwards by Stoicism ; we 
saw that it was governed in its general develop- 
ment by the transcendent influence of rhetoric in 
Greek life ; and we noticed that it was affected by 
the fact that in some measure it supplied the 
demand which is now supplied by fiction. Finally, 
we have seen how Roman historiography followed 
the lines of Greek historiography from which it 
sprang. 

It still remains to consider the ideas which the 
ancients entertained as to the use and purpose of 
studying history and recording it, in the Ught of 
modern ideas on the same subject. 



LECTURE VIII 

VIEWS OF THE ANCIENTS CONCERNING THE 
USE OF HISTORY 

It was not reserved for modern historians to ask 
themselves why history should be studied and why 
it should be written. The question was considered 
by ancient writers ; and it was first posed by Thucy- 
dides. Herodotus indeed announced that the 
general purpose of his work was to preserve the 
memory of past events and record great actions 
which deserve the meed of fame. This statement 
shows that Herodotus had not asked himself the 
question ; he assumed, and rightly assumed, the 
human interest of history ; but he did not examine 
what it meant. He was prompted to write his 
prose epic by the same instinct which prompted the 
Homeric minstrels to compose their epic poems. 

fjbovcr dp aoiSov avrjKev aeihefxevai Kkea avSpcov. 
The muse inspired the bard to sing of glorious deeds of men. 

He esteemed the aim of the historian to be exactly 
the same as the aim of the epic poet — to entertain 
an audience. So long as it was written from this 

242 



LECT.viii PRAGMATICAL DOCTRINE 243 

motive, it is clear that history was not likely to 
make truth and accuracy its first consideration. 

Thucydides definitely asked himself the question 
why a record of human events should be kept, and 
his answer placed history on a new footing. He 
repudiated the view that its only or chief object 
was to provide entertainment, and he laid down a 
reason for its study, which, so far as we know, was 
discovered by himself. " The accurate knowledge 
of what has happened," he says, "will be useful, 
because, according to human probability, similar 
things will happen again." This is the first state- 
ment of the opinion that history has another 
function than the satisfaction of curiosity or of 
patriotic pride, that it has a definite practical 
utility, that it contains lessons to instruct the states- 
man or the military commander. No historian was 
more profoundly convinced of the truth of this view 
than Polybius. He believed implicitly, as we saw, 
that history is a school of statesmanship as well as 
of the art of war ; he is never weary of insisting on 
the practical utility of his subject ; and the earnest- 
ness with which he held and preached this "prag- 
matical " doctrine is one of the distinctions of his 
work. As we have seen, the larger number of the . 
ancient historiographers at all times laid themselves 
out exclusively to please the reading public. But 
any ancient writer, subsequent to Thucydides, if 
you had asked him what was the use of studying 
history beyond the passing entertainment which it 
might yield, would have replied that the study 



244 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

served a practical purpose, supplying examples and 
warnings, and enabling men to judge the present 
and future by the past. Moralists (and with many 
historians the moral interest was predominant) 
would have insisted further that history supplied 
object lessons in ethics. 

Now the. point I would draw your attention to 
is that the ancients, generally, regarded history as 
possessing a practical use, and found the chief justi- 
fication of its study therein. Before going on to 
consider the assumptions on which their particular 
view of its utility depends, I must say a word about 
the general proposition that history is a subject of 
practical value. It seems to be opposed to a view, 
promulgated in the last century, which repudiates 
all practical ends and asserts that history must be 
studied purely for its own sake, as an end in itself, 
without any ulterior object, and that any bearings 
on practical life which may be assigned to it are 
incidental. This view, if interpreted in an absolute 
and literal sense, seems to me to be no more than 
simple nonsense. History cannot be isolated (except 
provisionally for methodical purposes) from the 
total complex of human knowledge ; and human 
knowledge has no value out of relation to human 
life. But if we explain "history for its own sake" 
as a regulative maxim, it is important and useful. 
In this sense, it means that history must be studied 
as if it had no bearing on anything beyond itself ; 
the historian, in investigating the facts of the past, 
must not, at least in the first instance, consider any- 



VIII HISTORY FOR ITS OWN SAKE 245 

thing beyond the facts themselves. In other words, 
it assumes that history is a science. The study of 
natural phenomena intimately affects society in its 
ethics, religion, and politics ; the study of historical 
phenomena must affect them too. But like physical 
sciences and all other branches of knowledge, history 
requires for its scientific development complete 
freedom and independence ; its value is annulled 
and its powers are paralysed if it consents to be 
ancillary to politics, ethics, or theology ; in order to 
fulfil its function, it must (like all sciences) be treated 
as if it were an end itself This is the true value 
and, so far as I can see, the only value of the cry, 
" History for its own sake ! " inscribed on the banner 
under which history has made such a striking 
advance in the nineteenth century. But this value, 
I repeat, is only that of a regulative principle ; it 
concerns only the methods and immediate aims of 
historians ; it does not express the final purpose of 
their labours. 

The Greeks were the founders of antiquarianism, 
and in a previous lecture I spoke of this as one 
of their precious contributions to human progress. 
Once it was started, it was pursued instinctively, 
unreflectingly, without asking the question, why? 
But a general answer was given in the circumstances 
of its origin. It was founded, as I said, by the Aris- 
totelian school of philosophy, and was the result of 
the importance which Aristotle attached to all 
phenomena, as things worth study and possessing 
significance for man's synthesis of the universe. 



246 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

And without being Aristotelians, or belonging to 
any school of philosophy, we must admit, that, as 
all things are interrelated, there must be a point at 
which every fact has a possible significance for 
man's view of his world, and therefore a practical 
value. Take historical phenomena. In the final 
synthesis of history, which may at least conceivably 
be achieved in the indefinitely distant future, all 
facts must have a place. And when we con- 
sider the inevitable lacunae in our records, it is clear 
that every fact is precious ; for instance, one trivial 
detail may be the means of leading us to the right 
reconstruction, just as in a detective's investigation 
an apparently insignificant circumstance (such as 
the spelling of a word) may put the clue in his 
hands. You never can tell. Thus the antiquarian 
historian is playing the long game. He collects, 
sifts, and interprets facts which, if you take the short 
view, may seem merely curious, without relation 
to human life, not the business of a man whose 
interests are human ; but at any time one of these 
facts may enable us to solve a problem, or prove a 
theory, the human interest of which is evident. We 
may say then that the cry of " history for its own 
sake," means that history has begun systematically 
to play the long game. Let us remember that 
however long be the game and however technical 
the rules, human interest is its ultimate justifi- 
cation. Let us not take the phrase "history 
for its own sake" to mean that it is not the 
proper function of history to serve any ulterior 



VIII ANTIQUARIAN HISTORY 247 

interest, and that any practical use it may have 
is thrown in, but not guaranteed. This idea is 
characteristically academic, one of those cloistral 
inanities which flourish, preposterous and un- 
ashamed, in the congenial air of universities. 

But, further, we must not be misled into ignor- 
ing or underrating the immediate practical value 
which the study of history possesses ; and this is 
the point which I would invite you especially to 
consider. The most important and able ancient 
historians, although some of them had antiquarian 
interests, held that the purpose of studying history 
must be sought in its practical value, and in imme- 
diate relations to life. But their idea of what that 
practical value consisted in, necessarily differs from 
our view of the matter at the present stage of 
man's development. The experience of the race 
and the advance of scientific thought have trans- 
formed our ideas of our own position in the universe ; 
and now the human or practical interest in history 
turns out to be far more vital and deeply founded 
than the ancients, with their outlook on life, could 
have suspected. 

Let us examine more closely the ancient doc- 
trine. Both Thucydides and Polybius based their 
view that history possesses direct utility for men of 
affairs, on the assumption that similar situations 
recur, and that the problems of the past will come 
up again for solution in the future. Thucydides, 
according to his habit, states this doctrine in the 
briefest form ; Polybius explains the principle with 



248 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

his usual elaboration, and rests it on a philosophical 
theory. We saw how he presented the theory of 
anacyclosis, a cyclical movement of history. At 
the end of each cycle a new circuit begins, and 
history follows, as it were, along the line of its 
former tracks. This view was widely current ; 
Cicero expresses it in the phrase miri orbes et quasi 
circuitus, " certain strange orbits and revolutions." 
The a priori synthesis of universal history which 
was launched on the world by the early Christian 
fathers, in the interest of their religion, threw the 
cyclical theory into the background. That theory 
was plainly incompatible with the central dogma 
of Christianity. Alter erit turn Tiphys would 
have meant alter erit turn Christus, and this 
would have stultified the Christian faith. But 
cyclical theories reappeared at the Renaissance. 
Machiavelli, who agreed with the ancients, and 
went further than they, in his high estimation 
of history as an instructress in politics, similarly 
based his view on the principle of a cyclical 
movement. Guicciardini likewise believed in the 
doctrine. 

Our longer experience has taught us that the 
assumptions on which the ancients grounded the 
claim of history to practical utility are untenable. 
■ The theory of cycles has been abandoned for the 
idea of indefinite "progress," and we have ascertained 
that history does not repeat itself; that the like- 
nesses between historical phenomena at different 
times are superficial and far less important than 



VIII THEORY OF CYCLES 249 

the differences. It follows that the particular kind 
of use which the ancients ascribed to history 
cannot be upheld, and that, if it does possess 
value for the education of men of affairs, that 
value is either of a more general nature, or entirely- 
different from what they supposed. 

And, as a matter of fact, we have ceased to look 
on history as a storehouse of examples and warnings 
for the politician, though we recognise that it has 
an educative value by familiarising him with the 
variety of political phenomena and by enlarging 
his horizon. But the conceptions of causality and 
development which govern our view, but did not 
govern the Greek view, of the world, have shown 
us that any given situation, or any social or 
political phenomenon, cannot be understood unless 
we know its antecedents ; or in other words, that 
to comprehend the significance of the present we 
must be acquainted with the history of the past. 
This, I think you would agree, is the main reason 
(according to our present ideas) why a study of 
history is desirable, if not indispensable, for the 
man who undertakes to share in the conduct of 
public affairs, and is desirable also for the private 
citizen who votes, and criticizes, and contributes to 
the shaping of public opinion. 

We may therefore still make the same claim 
for the study of history which Polybius made for it, 
that it is a school for statesmen and citizens, 
though we base the claim on a different ground. 
But beyond this direct utility, it has a larger and 



250 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

deeper practical importance. For the last two 
generations historical investigation has been exer- 
cising, steadily and irresistibly, an influence on our 
mental attitude ; it has been affecting our sense of 
our own position in the world and our estimate of 
the values of things. History, in the ordinary and 
narrower sense of recorded human transactions, has 
been advancing concurrently with that wider his- 
tory, which is the business of physical science, and 
which embraces the evolution of life on our planet, 
the evolution of the planet itself, and the evolution 
of the cosmos. But certain results of historical 
science, though less sensational, have been in some 
respects not less effective, than the results of 
physical science, because they are closer to us 
and, at present at least, concern us more directly. 
These results may perhaps be summed up most 
concisely in the phrase used by German writers, 
" historical relativity." We have come to see that 
all events in the past, however differing in import- 
ance, were relative to their historical conditions ; 
that they cannot be wrenched out of their chrono- 
logical context and endowed with an absolute 
significance. They are parts of a whole, and have 
no meaning except in relation to that whole, just 
as a man's arm has no meaning apart from his 
body. The recognition of this truth at once affects 
our view of the present ; for it follows that the 
ideas and events of to-day have no absolute value, 
but merely represent a particular stage of human 
development. Ideas and facts are thus put in 



VIII HISTORICAL RELATIVITY 251 

their place. Some are abased, others are exalted. 
If they are dependent on their historical context, 
they may also be justified by it. For instance, 
from the point of view of modern conditions, we 
shudder at the relation which the Church held to 
the State in the Middle Ages ; but when we study 
the conditions of that period, we may acknowledge 
that the relation was justified. It is hard to say 
at which of our present-day Western institutions 
future generations will shudder most ; but we may 
hope that they will also discover justifications. 
This principle of historical relativity induces what 
may be called the historical attitude of mind ; it 
changes our outlook also on the present and the 
future ; and therefore it has a direct practical 
value. Perhaps it is fair to say that it is one of 
the most important results of the mental develop- 
ment of the nineteenth century.^ 

I have suggested that this change is not less 
effective than our new conceptions of the evolution 
of nature. I may illustrate this by comparing the 
ways in which the advance of historical science and 

^ Although the principle of historical relativity, with its implication 
that there are no absolute values in history, that values vary according to 
time and place, is a modern idea ; nevertheless the Greeks made virtual 
application of it, occasionally and in very simple cases. Thucydides 
furnishes an instance. He suggests that, if the Greeks of his day regard 
piracy as an offence against morals, they must not apply their standard 
to a different stage of civUisation, when piracy was esteemed an honour- 
able profession. This is one of the few examples to be found in ancient 
writers of what we caU an historical sense. Another example is furnished 
by Eratosthenes, who pointed out that in studying Homer the historical 
conditions of his age must be taken into account, and that his geogra- 
phical ideas corresponded to the ignorance which then prevailed ; his 
authority therefore has no value transcending the conditions of his own 
time. 



252 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

the advance of physical science have respectively 
operated on theology. The discoveries of geology, 
the doctrine of evolution, and the Darwinian theory 
created loud alarm in the Churches, but they really 
only touched outworks ; and their acceptance by 
ecclesiastical authorities could not have had a much 
greater effect on the received body of essential 
doctrine than the acceptance of the heliocentric 
system which seemed a diabolical idea to the per- 
secutors of Galilei. Contrast the effects of the 
historical criticism which began with Strauss and 
Bauer. It has been operating as a steady and 
powerful solvent of traditional beliefs ; and to-day 
we see that within the Churches the men who have 
brains and are not afraid to use them are trans- 
forming the essential doctrines, under the aegis of 
historical criticism, so radically that when those doc- 
trines emerge it will be difficult to recognise them. 
I may observe here, and by the way, that it is 
highly important for the historian to be aware that 
the doctrine of historical relativity applies no less 
to his own historical judgments than to other facts. 
His view is conditioned by the mentality of his 
own age ; the focus of his vision is determined 
within narrow limits by the conditions of contem- 
porary civilisation. There can therefore be nothing 
final about his judgments, and their permanent 
interest lies in the fact that they are judgments 
pronounced at a given epoch and are characteristic 
of the tendencies and ideas of that epoch. The 
Greeks had no notion of this. They would have 



VIII HISTORICAL RELATIVITY 253 

said that the judgment of a wise man at any time 
might be final or absolutely valid. Older Christian 
historians thought that they were in possession of 
absolute criteria ; and the illusion that a historical 
judgment may be the last word is still prevalent. 
It must ultimately yield to the principle of his- 
torical relativity which, as the experience of the 
race grows, will be more and more fully recognised. 

Before I pass from this principle I may note 
another point. One might think a priori that the 
study of history is eminently adapted to form an 
antidote to chauvinism, self-satisfaction, and in- 
tolerance. It cannot, however, be said that 
hitherto it has actually done much to counteract 
these habits of mind ; it has been more inclined to 
subserve them. But it seems probable that it may 
be more effective in the future. The new historical 
conception, which we have been considering, is 
evidently calculated to promote the spirit of 
tolerance, and cool the spirit of self-satisfaction, 
more efficaciously than any previous idea. The 
tolerance of the ordinary man who naively urges in 
excuse of the heathen that they "know no better" 
must be applied, on the principle of historical rela- 
tivity, to ourselves ; that principle bids us remember 
that tioe "know no better," that we stand within 
the strict barriers of our historical conditions, and 
that we shall be judged hundreds or thousands of 
years hence by critics who look forth from a higher 
specular platform of civilisation. 

The thought of the judgment of a distant 



254 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

posterity leads us to another, though closely related, 
conception which has only in recent times become 
alive and real for us. It is remarkable how little 
the Greeks and Romans thought or speculated 
about the future of the race. The shortness of the 
period over which their historical records extended, 
their doctrine of cyclical recurrence, and the widely 
spread belief in a decline from a golden age, may 
have hindered them from taking a practical interest 
in the subject ; though they contemplated long 
periods of time, for instance the magnus annus, 
equivalent in duration to 12,954 ordinary years. 
Tacitus, in a very interesting passage, asks : What 
do we mean by using the terms ancient and 
modem ? " The four hundred years, which separate 
us from Demosthenes, seem long in comparison 
with the brevity of human life ; but they are almost 
a vanishing quantity if you compare them with the 
duration of the ages {ad naturam saeculorum) ; 
why, if you consider even the magnus annus, 
Demosthenes, whom we call an ancient, seems to 
belong to the same year, nay the same month, as 
ourselves." This passage stands almost alone, I 
think, in its appreciation of historical perspective. 
But such flashes of consciousness of our position 
in time did not awaken any serious or persistent 
curiosity about the future fortunes of the race. 
The Greeks were imbued with what may justly be 
called a progressive spirit ; but they did not asso- 
ciate their labours for the improvement of civilisa- 
tion with any notion of an indefinite advance of the 



VIII IDEA OF DEVELOPMENT 255 

human race in knowledge, in mastery of nature, 
and in the structure of society. I think we may 
safely say that the general conditions of their own 
life and thought seemed to the Greeks final, capable 
only of modification and improvement in details ; 
they never dreamed that more complex forms of civil- 
isation, and entirely different from theirs, might be 
reached by a gradual development in the course of 
time. They dreamed of a golden age, but they 
generally placed it behind them. They sought it 
in simpler, not in more complex, conditions. And 
their eagerness to improve the lot of man did not 
take the form of a conscientious or passionate sense 
of obligation to posterity. The idea of duty 
towards posterity which often appears in Greek 
patriotic orations has mainly a rhetorical value, and 
does not imply any serious concern about future 
generations. Afterwards, the fancy of the Chris- 
tians that the life of the human race on earth 
would be very brief, and that men would then pass 
into monotonous states in which there would be no 
history, excluded any thoughts of future terrestrial 
progress ; and the psychological effects of this 
error, promulgated by the Church, are a distinct 
factor in human development. It is only since this 
fiction has been exploded that the vista of progress 
in an indefinitely long future has become part of 
our mental outlook, and has introduced, as all ideas 
of such a range must introduce, a new ethical 
principle, namely, duty towards the future heirs of 
the ages. Progress was a feature in the philosophy 



256 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

of Leibniz. In 1750 Turgot stated a theory of 
historical progress very clearly. But though the 
doctrine was not new at the time of the French 
Revolution, the full significance of the idea was 
first impressed on the world in the famous book of 
Turgot's friend, Condorcet, Esquisse d\in tableau 
historique des progres de V esprit humain (1795). 
Here the meaning of the historical process was 
declared to be social and political progress. It 
is easy to see that this view, which was diffused 
by the writings of Comte and Buckle, as well as 
by the speculations of Saint-Simon and Fourier, 
was calculated to stimulate interest in the past 
more powerfully than any previous conception. 
It imparts to history an intenser meaning. We are 
led to conceive the short development which is 
behind us and the long development which is 
before us as coherent parts of a whole ; our " prag- 
matic " interest in the destinies of our race neces- 
sarily communicates a " pragmatic " interest to its 
past fortunes. 

"Progress" of course implies a judgment of value, 
and is not scientific. It assumes a standard, — 
some end or ends, by relation to which we judge 
historical movements and declare that they mean 
progress. We have no proof that absolute pro- 
gress has been made, for we have no knowledge of 
an absolute end ; and, therefore, scientifically we 
are not justified in speaking of the history of 
civilised man as progress ; we can only be sure that 
it is a causal sequence of transformations. 



VIII IDEA OF PROGRESS 257 

It may, then, be objected that the indefinite 
progress of the race is only an assumption, which 
time may disprove. It may be asked too, what 
guarantee have we that our Western civilisation, 
granting that it is on an upward gradient, and that 
no bounds or bars to its ascent are yet in sight, may 
not some day reach a definite limit, through the 
operation of some cause which is now obscure to 
our vision ? Fully admitting that such theoretical 
scepticism is justifiable, and that persistent progress 
is an assumption, I submit that it does not affect 
my point. The idea of progress is, in the present 
age, an actual, living force ; and what I have said 
as to its bearing on the study of history remains 
valid. May we not even say that the uncertainty 
which hangs about the question, with the possi- 
bility of man's progress on the one hand, and of 
his decadence on the other, communicates an 
appealing interest to the study of the past, as a 
field in which we may discover, if we can penetrate 
deep enough, some clue to the destinies of civilisa- 
tion ? 

The absence of the idea of an indefinite progress 
in Greek and Roman speculation is one of the 
gulfs which separate us from the ancients. Its 
emergence has had the consequence of making 
history far more alive. With the Greeks, who 
applied the inadequate conception of Tyche or 
Fortune, the reconstruction of the past was an 
instinct which they justified by reasons which were 
superficial. For us, because we have a deeper 

s 



258 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS lect. 

insight into the causal connexion of past and 
future, because we have grasped the idea of develop- 
ment and dreamed the dream of progress, the 
reconstruction of history has become a necessity. 

It has also become a science. The promotion of 
history to the rank of a science or Wissenschaft is 
due to the conception of development. We con- 
ceive every historical event or phenomenon as a 
moment in a continuous process of change, and the 
historian's problem is to determine as completely 
as possible its connexions with what went before 
and with what came after, to define its causal rela- 
tions and its significance in the development to 
which it belongs. The unattainable ideal of his- 
torical research is to explain fully the whole 
development of human civilisation. This is as 
much a scientific problem as to trace the history of 
the solar system or of animal life on the earth, 
though natural and historical science deal with 
very different kinds of data, and employ different 
methods. If the Greeks had possessed records 
extending over the history of two or three 
thousand years, the conception of causal develop- 
ment would probably have emerged, and they 
might have founded scientific history. The limita- 
tion of their knowledge of the past to a few 
centuries disabled them from evolving this idea ; 
and history therefore always remained subordinate 
to immediate practical ends. But we must not 
underrate the importance of the new view which 
Thucydides announced to the world, that history is 



VIII SCIENTIFIC HISTORY 259 

not merely a story book, but an education for 
statesmen. That view marked a great advance. 
It meant a new conception of the historian's 
responsibility and the inauguration of a higher 
standard of accuracy. Its proclamation by Thucy- 
dides may be placed beside the announcement of 
scientific history in 1824 ^ by Ranke, who suggested 
that the historian's task is not to teach lessons or 
pass judgments, but simply to investigate how 
things happened. And as the view of Thucydides 
was combined with the requirement of accuracy, 
so the appearance of the modern doctrine was 
contemporaneous with the introduction of scientijfic 
methods. 

As a science, history is disinterested. Yet the , 
very idea of development, which led to the con- 
ception of history as a science, has enhanced its 
interest for mankind. So far, indeed, is the Greek 
view that history has a value for life from being 
exploded, that the bearing of the past on our 
mental outlook, on our ideas and judgments, on the 
actualities of the present and the eventualities of 
the future, is increasing more and more, and is 
becoming charged with deeper significance. The 
Hellenic conception of history as humanistic is 
truer than ever. 

1 Preface to Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Volker von 
1494 bis 1535. 



APPENDIX 

THE RE-HANDLING OF HIS HISTORY BY 
THUCYDIDES 

The natural probability that Thucydides occupied the years 
of his exile after the Fifty Years' Peace in finishing and 
revising the history of the war which was apparently over, 
is borne out by a number of passages which evidently con- 
template only the Ten Years' War, and must have been 
difierently phrased if they had been composed after 404 b.c. 
But, on the other hand, there are also a number of passages 
which refer to later events, and imply the Sicilian expedition 
and the fall of Athens. The obvious explanation is that the 
author read over the first portion of his work, and made 
a number of additions and alterations, but allowed some 
inconsistent phrases to escape his eye.^ 

The most unmistakable of these additions is the passage ^ 
in which the author escorts Pericles from the scene and 
characterizes his statesmanship in the light of the subsequent 
events which approved its wisdom, showing that if his policy 
had been pursued, and if he had had a successor like him- 
self, the issue would have been different. Here Thucydides 
comments on the Sicilian expedition and refers to the later 
events of the war.^ 

But there is a far longer and more important section in 

^ As iv. 48. 5 ; ii. 94. 1 (which was not revised in the light of viii. 96. 1). 

2 u. 65. 5 to end. 

3 The last sentences of ii. 81 were posterior to the Sicilian expedition. 
The notice of Archelaus (413-399 b.c), ii. 100. 2, is a late insertion ; like- 
wise iv. 74. 4. E. Meyer has noted that Kprjvai yap oiiiru Ijaav airodi, ii. 48. 2, 
points to a date after 414 b.c. (schol. Arist. Av. 997). 

261 



262 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS 

the first Book which must be judged a subsequent insertion : 
the historical sketch of the growth of Athens from the year 
478 to 435 B.C. The purpose of this sketch is to exhibit the 
growth of the Athenian hegemony, and its justification is 
that the true cause of the war, so far as the Spartans were 
concerned, was to prevent Athens from increasing that 
hegemony still more. Now if Thucydides had grasped this 
idea from the first, the appropriate place for his historical 
sketch, both logically and chronologically, was at the 
beginning of his work, in the Introduction. It would have 
formed a natural continuation of the still earlier history 
which he had sketched there. Instead, it comes in after 
the account of the First Assembly of allies at Sparta, 
strangely interrupting the narrative. It serves perhaps an 
artistic purpose ; for it affords a not unwelcome pause after 
the strain of the four speeches in the First Assembly, before 
we pass to the immediately following speech of the Corin- 
thians in the Second Assembly. But while this consideration 
may have determined the place chosen for its insertion, it 
was, I believe, an afterthought. There is internal evidence 
that it was not originally part of the work.^ For the Intro- 
duction, where, as I said, we might have expected to find 
such a sketch, actually contains a brief summary of the 
relevant features of the period.^ Further, Thucydides had 
before him, as he tells us, the Attic chronicle of Hellanicus ; 
the defects of that work supplied him with a special motive 
for writing a more adequate and accurate narrative ; and 
this work of Hellanicus was not published in its earlier form 
till 411 B.C., in its later till 404 b.c. And may we not fairly 
say that these prolegomena had a fuller justification in a 
history of a war ending in the catastrophe of the Athenian 
empire than in the narrative of a war ending with the 

1 The allusion to the destruction of the long walls (c. 93. 5) cannot be 
pressed, as it might have been introduced alone. But it is to be noted 
that the Pentekontaeteris is ignored in i. 146 ; while i. 23. 6 seems to be a 
later insertion. 

2 Cc. 18, 19. The Introduction (i. 1-23) was evidently written before 
414 B.C. as a Preface to the history of the Ten Years' War. A few phrases 
may have been changed or added, but not so much as an allusion to the 
fall of Athens was introduced. 



APPENDIX 263 

indecisive Peace of 421 b.c, which left things pretty much 
as they were ? 

Again, we may reasonably suspect that the speech of 
Hermocrates at Gela in 424 b.c. was composed and inserted 
after the Sicilian expedition. While it contains remarks 
which seem to imply that the later events were before the 
author's mind,^ the decisive consideration is that the signifi- 
cance of the transactions of 424 b.c. was not apparent till the 
events beginning in 415 B.C., and it seems most improbable 
that but for those events Thucydides would have emphasized 
the Congress of Gela by introducing the speech of Hermocrates.- 

It is a delicate question whether some of the other 
speeches in the early section have been retouched, and reflect 
light impinging from what at the time lay in the obscurity 
of the future. For instance, in the appeal for peace which 
Spartan envoys addressed to the Athenian assembly,^ at the 
time of the Sphacterian episode, they hold up an ideal of 
conduct which sounds like an ironical reflexion on Sparta's 
own treatment of Athens twenty years later. To Eduard 
Meyer, the funeral oration pronounced by Pericles on those 
who had fallen in the first year of the war seems designed 
by the author to be in truth a funeral oration on Athens 
herself. This is a pretty idea, but I cannot find anything 
in the speech necessarily implying that it was written after 
the catastrophe. On the other hand, in the later speech 
of Pericles, delivered to encourage the Athenians in their 
despondency, there is a passage which seems to accuse him 
of second sight. There is a vein of pessimism or melancholy, 
a note which Pericles would not have struck on such *an 
occasion, and which the author would hardly have introduced 
before the worst had befallen. The speaker observes that 
decline and fall {iXaa-a-ovcrdai) is a law of nature, and that if 
Athens should fall, she will leave a great memory of her 
empire, her military successes, and her wealth. This is the 
consolation one might proffer after 404 b.c. ; it is not what 
would have been said to comfort the citizens in 429 b.c. ; it 
is hardly what would have been written in the interval. 

^ iv. 60 : allusions to the Athenian expedition and to Melos. 
2 iv. 17-20. 



264 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS 

The narrative of the last years of the first war may have 
demanded revision for another reason. The author was 
absent from Athens ever since he assumed the command 
of a fleet in Thrace, and there were documents and informa- 
tion which perhaps he had no opportunity to procure until 
he returned to his country after his exile. It has been 
suggested by Kirchhoff that the text of the armistice between 
Athens and Sparta in 423 b.c.^ was a subsequent insertion. 
It might, of course, have been procured at Sparta. The 
text too of the Peace of 421 b.c.^ is inserted in a narrative 
which reads rather as if it had been composed without 
accurate knowledge of the precise stipulations ; but this 
can hardly be pressed. In general it seems probable that all 
the verbal copies of documents which appear in the text 
would, in the final revision, have been reproduced in the 
author's own words. 

Although Thucydides re-handled his early work, which 
was now to be only part of a much greater work, he never 
prepared it finally for publication or gave it the last touches 
of revision. Passages remain which exhibit the earlier view 
that the war was over in 421 ; and there are difficulties here 
and there which are probably due to want of final cor- 
rection. 

In the transition from the first to the second part of his 
history (v. 20-26) there are clear signs of imperfect joining, 
due to the successive views which Thucydides entertained of 
the war, namely : 

(1) Before 414 b.c. : one war of ten years (jov TroXefxov 

TovSe, 20. 1) ; 

(2) After 414 b.c. : two wars, of which the second began 

in this year and was in progress ; 

(3) After 404 b.c. : one war of twenty-seven years. 

In the first place we can see, I think, how Thucydides 
originally concluded his history of the first war, before he 
thought of a continuation (414 b.c). We have two conclu- 
sions, c. 20 and c. 24. C. 20 is the natural conclusion ; it im- 
mediately follows the Fifty Years' Peace which terminated the 
war. But then cc. 21-24 relate the alliance between the 



APPENDIX 265 

Athenians and Lacedaemonians which followed a little later ; 
and a phrase in c. 24 betrays the fact that this was inserted 
after 404 B.C. : kol to Oepos 'qpX^ tou kv^^Karov €TOVS. The 

eleventh year, of what ? Of the war of twenty-seven yeai-s. 

After these words there follows : raura 8e ra 8eKa eVr; o TT/awros 
TToAe/Aos ^we^ws yevo/xevos yeypaTrrai. Obviously this is (1) out 
of place here ; it ought to come in c. 20 after the Peace ; 
and (2) in point of grammar, raCra is not intelligible, for no 
ten years have been mentioned in the context. But if it 
came originally in c. 20 (whether after the last sentence or 
after the first ; in both positions tuvtu would be equally in 
place), it was considerably altered, for the point of ^wex^s 
is the contrast between the Ten Years' War and the 
Twenty-seven Years' War. But the alteration was made 
hastily and provisionally ; and ravra, which betrays it, shows 
the lack of a careful final revision. 

Cc. 25, 26 form the introduction to the second part of 
the history. C. 26 declares itself to have been written after 
404 B.C. C. 25 ma?/ have been written while Thucydides 
still considered the second part to be the history of a second 
war ; but there is no proof of this hypothesis.^ On the other 
hand, the introduction of Trpcurw, Trpwros at the end of the 
first part (20 ad Jin., 24 ad Jin.) might naturally have been 
made when he began his continuation after 414 b.c. 

It is an interesting philological problem to penetrate into 
the secrets of the historian's workshop, but here I have been 
only concerned to illustrate the important facts that the 
first part of the work was re-handled and that in some parts 
it needed further revision. 

^ It involves the corollary that the words koX t^v ^vfifj-axl^a-v ' M-qvaluv 

(25. 1) were subsequently added, concurrently with the insertion of 
31-24. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

[This selected list comprises works which have been of 
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of these lectures. Editions of the historians are not included 
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1. General 

Bauer, A. Die Forschungen zur griechischen Geschichte 

1888-1898. Munich, 1899. 
Beloch, J. Griechische Geschichte, vols, i.-iii. Strassburg, 

1893-1904. 
Bruns, I. Das litterarische Portrat der Griechen im fiinften 

und vierten Jahrhundert v. Chr. Berlin, 1896. 
Bruns, I. Die Personlichkeit in der Geschichtschreibung der 

Alten. Berlin, 1898. 
BiJDiNGER, M. Die Universalhistorie im Altertum. Vienna, 

1895. 
BusoLT, G. Griechische Geschichte, vols, i.-iii. Gotha, 

1893-1904. 
Cauer, F. Thukydides und seine Vorganger. Historische 

Zeitschrift, 83, 385 sqq. 1899. 
Creuzer, G. F. Die historische Kunst der Griechen in ihrer 

Entstehung und Fortbildung. (323 pp.) Leipzig, 

1803. 
DioNYSius OF Haltcarnassus. Opera rhetorica. (Especially, 

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UofjLTrrjiov TefjbLvov eTrto-ToAij, and the fragments of TLepl 

jLit/xi^crews.) 
Drerup, E. Die historische Kunst der Griechen. Jahr- 

biicher fiir klassische Philologie, Supplementband xxvii. 

443 sqq. 1902. 

267 



268 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS 

GoMPERz, Th. Griechische Denker, vol. i. Leipzig, 1893, 
etc. 

Leo, F. Die griechisch-romische Biographie. Leipzig, 
1901. 

Mahaffy, J. P. History of Classical Greek Literature, vol. 
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Mahaffy, J. P. Greek Life and Thought, 323-146 b.c. 
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Meyer, E. Geschichte des Altertums, vols, ii.-v. Stutt- 
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Meyer, E. Forschungen zur alten Geschichte, I. Zur 
alteren griechischen Geschichte. Halle, 1892. 

MiJLLER, C. Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum, vols, i.-iv. 
Paris, 1841-51. 

MuLLER, C. Scriptores rerum Alexandri Magni (along with 
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Murray, Gilbert. History of Ancient Greek Literature. 
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NoRDEN, E. Die antike Kunstprosa. Leipzig, 1898. 

Peter, H. Die geschichtliche Litteratur iiber die romische 
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ScHiRMEisTER, H. Charakteristische Erscheinungen in der 
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Seeck, O. Die Entwicklung der antiken Geschichtschrei- 
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Stahl, Th. Ueber den Zusammenhang der altesten grie- 
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SusEMiHL, F. Geschichte der griechischen Litteratur in der 
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Wachsmuth, C. Einleitung in das Studium der alten Ge- 
schichte. Leipzig, 1895. 

Wachsmuth, C. Ueber Ziele und Methoden der griechischen 
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WipPRECHT, F. Zur Entwicklung der rationalistischen 
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Acusilaus. 

KoRDT, A. De Acusilao. Basel, 1903 
Antiochus. 

WoLFFLiN, J. Antiochus von Syrakus und Coelius 
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Aristotle. 

Seeck, O. Quellenstudien zu des Aristoteles Verfas- 
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WiLAMowiTz - MoLLENDORFF, U. VON. Aristoteles und 
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Craterus. 

Keil, B. Der Perieget Heliodorus von Athen. Hermes, 

XXX. 199 sqq. 1894. 
Krech, J. De Crateri '^rj<f>i(Tfji,ari>iv o-wayui-yq et de locis 
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Cratippus. Oxyrhynchus Papyri, Part V. (ed. Grenfell 

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De Sanctis, Gaetano. L' Attide di Androzione e un 
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Lehmann, C. F. Dionysios von Milet. Beitrage zur 
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Schwartz, E. Article "Ephoros" in Pauly-Wissowa, 
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Prasek, J. V. Hekataios als Herodots Quelle zur Ge- 
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Kullmer, H. Hellanikos. Jahrbiicher fiir klassische 

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fragments.] 

Lehmann-Haupt, C. F. Hellanikos, Herodot, Thuky- 

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Herodotus. 

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schichtswerkes. Berlin, 1878. 
Hauvetie, a. Herodote historien des guerres mediques. 

Paris, 1894. 
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Geschichtswerkes, Ed. 2. Berlin, 1878. 
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Herodot. Beitrage zur alten Geschichte (Klio), 

i. 256 sqq. 1901. 
Macan, R. W. Herodotus, Books iv. to vi. 2 vols. 

1895. Books vii. to ix. 2 vols. 1908. 
Plutarch, Hepl ttjs "HpoSorov KaKorjOeias. In vol, 5 of 

the Moralia ed. Bernardakis. 
Schwartz, E. Quaestiones lonicae. Rostock, 1891. 
Wiedemann, A. Herodots zweites Buch mit sachlichen 

Bemerkungen. Leipzig, 1890. 
Isocrates. 

Scala, R. von. Isokrates und die Geschichtschreibung. 

(Vortrag auf der 41. Versammlung deutscher Philo- 

logen.) Leipzig, 1892. 
Pherecydes of Leros. 

Bertsch, H. Pherekydeische Studien. Tauberbischofs- 

heim, 1898. 
Polybius. 

Cuntz, O. Polybius und sein Werk. Leipzig, 1902. 
Davidson, J. Strachan. Selections from Polybius. 

Oxford, 1888. 
La-Roche, P. Charakteristik von Polybius. Leipzig, 

1857. 
Nissen, H. Die Oekonomie der Geschichte des Poly- 
bios. Rheinisches Museum, xxvi. 241 sqq. 1871. 
Scala, R. von. Die Studien des Polybios, i. Stutt- 
gart, 1890. 
Thommen, R. Abfassungszeit der Geschichten des 

Polybios. Hermes, xx. 196 sqq. 1885. 
Wunderer, C. Die psychologischen Anschauungen des 

Historikers Polybios. Erlangen, 1905. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 271 

Theopompus. 

DiDYMus. De Demosthene Commenta. Ed. Diels and 

Schubart in Berliner Klassikertexte, i. Berlin, 

1904, and in Teubner's Volumina Aegyptiaca. 

Leipzig, 1904. 
Thucydides. 

BusoLT, G. Thukydides und der themistokleische 

Mauerbau. Beitrage zur alten Geschichte (Klio), 

V. 255 sqq. 1905. 
CoRNFORD, F. M. Thucydides Mythistoricus. London, 

1907. 
CwiKLiNSKi, L. Quaestiones de tempore quo Thucy- 
dides priorem historiae suae partem composuerit. - 

Berlin, 1873. 
Herbst, L. Zur Urkunde in Thukydides v. 47. 

Hermes, xxvii. 374 sqq. 1891. 
HoLZAPFEL, L. Doppelte Relationen im viii. Buche des 

Thukydides. Hermes, xxix. 435 sqq. 1894. 
KiKCHHOFF, A. Thukydides und sein Urkundenma- 

terial. Berlin, 1895. 
KoRNEMANN, E. Thukydides und die romische His- 

toriographie. Philologus, Ixiii. 148 sqq. 
Meves, W. Untersuchungen liber das achte Buch 

der thukydideischen Geschichte. Brandenburg 

a. H., 1865. 
NissEN, H. Der Ausbruch des peloponnesischen 

Krieges. Historische Zeitschrift Ixiii. (N. F. 

xxvii.) 385 sqq. 1890. 
Stein, H. Zur Quellenkritik des Thukydides. Rheini- 

sches Museum Iv. 531 sqq. 1900. 
Steup, J. Thukydides, Antiochos und die angebliche 

Biographie des Hermokrates [a refutation of Stein's 

paper]. lb. Ivi. 443 sqq. 1901. 
Wilamowitz-Mollendorff, U. von. Memoriae oblite- 

ratae. Hermes, xi. 294 sqq. 1876. 
Wilamowitz-Mollendorff, U. von. Die Thukydides- 

legende. Hermes, xii. 326 sqq. 1877. 
Timaeus. 

Geffcken. Timaios' Geographie des Westens. Berlin, 

1892. 



INDEX 



Achaeans, Polybius on, 202, 216, 
217 

Acton, Lord, 232 

Acusilaus of Argos, mythogra- 
pher, 18, 19-21, 25, 103 

Aegina, miracle of statues in, 58 

Aescliines, Dialogues of, 180 

Aeschylus, 66, 68, 109 

Africanus, Sextus Julius, 237 

Agathocles, books on 168, 169, 
172 

Agesilaus, 152, 153 

alTla in Thucydides, 93, 94, in 
Polybius, 200 

Alcibiades, conjectural relations 
with Thucydides (Kirchhoff), 
84 ; treatment of, by Thucy- 
dides, 88, 120, 127 sq. ; 
forcible style, 109 

Alcidamas, 170 

Alcmaeonids, Herodotus on, 61, 
64 

Alexander the Great, 159, 162 ; 
Hegesias on, 171 ; influence of 
his conquests on historio- 
graphy, 175 sqq., 178 

Alexandria, libraries, 187 ; anti- 
quarianism at, 187 sqq. 

Ammianus Marcellinus, 234 

Anacyclosis. See under Cyclical 

Anaxagoras, 129 

Anaximander, 11, 15, 205 

Anaximenes, historian, 162 

Androtion, 156, 179, 183 

Annus, inagnus, 254 

Anticleides, 183 

Antiochus of Commagene, 170 

Antiochus of Syracuse, 26 sq., 103 

Antiphon, 103, 120 sq., 144, 179, 
180 

Antiquarianism, 188 sqq. 

Autisthenes, 180 



Antisthenes of Rhodes, 216 

Apollodorus, his use of Hellanicus, 
30 

Apollonius of Rhodes, 168 

Appian, 221 

Aratus, Memoirs of, 176, 233 

Archidamus, 91, 113 

aperi,, 119, 144 

Aristeas of Proconnesus, 7, 25 

Aristobulus, Memoirs of, 175, 176 

Aristophanes, 99, 122 

Aristotle, 179 ; 182 sqq., 246 

Arrian, l75 

Ax-taxerxes I., reference to, in 
Herodotus, 37 

Artemisium, battle of; incident 
not recorded by Herodotus, 
25 

Asconius, 234 

Asianic style, 169 sqq., two kinds 
of, 170 sq. ; example, I7l sq. 

Assur-bani-pal, his history of his 
own reign, 3 

Astyochus, Spartan general, 84 

'Adrjvaluv TroXtreta, anonymous, 179 

Athens, partiality of Herodotus to, 
62 sqq. ; Herodotus at, 36, 65, 
69 ; Athenian tradition of Per- 
sian war, 66 ; Lectures IIL 
and IV. passim, 155 ; educa- 
tional and literary centre, 
161, 167 

Atthidographers, 183 

Atticism, 148, 170, 206 

Augustine, St., 237, 239 

Augustus, Emperor, 227, 230 

Be'rard, V., 7, 100, 219 
Bertsch, H., 19, and Bibliography 
Biography, 147, 153 sq., 234 
Bios, pregnant meaning of, 153, 
cp. 187 



273 



274 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS 



Bismarck, 143 

Blass, F., 156 

Brasidas, 141 

Bruns^ I. , 117, and Bibliography 

Buckle, H. T., 256 

Burrows, R. M., 86 

Cadmus of Miletus, evidence for, 

14-15 ; 16 ; 25 
Caesar, Julius, Commentaries of, 

176, 232 sq. 
Caligula, Emperor, 227 
Callimachus, poet, 168 
Cannae, battle of, 197 
Carian population in Aegean 

islands, 104 
Carthag:e, 208, 217, 218 
Carthage, New, 86, 194 
Cato, M. Porcius, the Censor, 225, 

226, 229 
Cauer, F., 119, and Bibliography 
Cavour, 143 
Charinus, decree of, 87 
Charon of Lampsacus, 21 sq., 23, 

26 note, 29, 67 
Cheirocracy, 205 

Christian construction of world- 
history, 237 sqq. 
Chronology, of early historians, 

27 sqq. ; uncertainty of early, 
32 ; want of a fixed era, ib. ; 
of Herodotus, 72 sq. ; of 
Thucydides, 105 sq.; Olymp- 
iads, 167, 194 

Chrysippus, a determinist, 204 
Cicero, 160, 221, 233, 248 
Cimmerians, invasion of, 7 
Cimon, 75, 77 

Civilisation. See under History 
Claudius, Emperor, 229 
Cleidemus, 183 
.Cleitarclius of Colophon, 176 
Cleon, his speech on Mytilene, 

115 .sq., 137 ; treatment by 

Thucydides, 118, 123 
Comte, Auguste, 256 
Condorcet, 256 
Con on, 157 

Corbulo, Memoirs of, 176 
Corinth, her instigation of 

Peloponnesian war, 96 sq. 
Cornelius Nepos, 230 
Cornford, F. M., 92, 100, 123, 

124, and Bibliography 
Crater us, 189 



Cratinus, 99 

Cratippus, 155 sqq., 165 

Crete, thalassocracy of, 104 

Critias, 179 

Critobulus, 149 

Croesus, interview with Solon, 

44, 57 ; pyre of, 58 
Ctesias, 166 

Cuntz, O., 194, and Bibliography 
Curiositas, antiquarianism, 188 
Cyclical theory of history, 205 

sq. , 248 
Cyclopes, legend of their death; 

treated by Pherecydes, 18 

Damastes, 26 

Davidson, J. Strachan, 194, and 
Bibliography 

Deiochus, historian, 25 note, 26 

Delbruck, H., 198 

Delos, digression of Thucydides 
on, 89 sq. 

Delphi, legends emanating from, 
10 ; miraculous deliverance 
from Persians, 59 sq. 

Demetrius Phalereus, 187 ; his 
Uepl r{!X>P, 200 sq. 

Democles, 25, 26 

Democritus, 130 

Demon, 183 

Dexippus, 148 

Dicaearchus, 187 

Didymus, Commentary on Demo- 
sthenes, 183 

Diodorus, use of Hellanicus by, 
30 note ; used Timaeus, 168, 
used Poseidonius, 221 ; Uni- 
versal History of, 235 sq. 

Diodotus, 115, 137 

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, on 
Charon, 22 note, on the style 
of the early historians, 26 ; 
list of early historians, 26 
note 3 ; on Herodotus, 42 ; on 
Thucydides, 90, 102, 106 ; on 
the style of Thucydides, 110 
sq., 113 sq., 148; cliarges 
Thucydides with want of 
patriotism, 131 sq. ; on ex- 
aggerated admiration of 
Thucydides, 146; on Cra- 
tippus, 157, 158 ; on Philistus, 
159 ; on Theopompus, 166 ; 
on Atticism, 206 ; his History, 
226 



INDEX 



275 



Dionysius of Miletus, 22-24 ; sole 
fragment of, 22 note ^, 67 

Dionysius I. of Syracuse, 158, 
i59, 160 

Dionysus, god distinguished from 
man, 48 

Disraeli (Lord Beaconsfield), 143 

Dorian institutions, Plato on, 186 

Drerup, E., 181 

Duris, 172 sqq. , 209 

Eclipses (solar) in Tlmcydides, 
129 

Egypt : mythical traditions com- 
pared with those of Greece, 
14, 48 ; Athenian expedition 
to, 41 ; Hecataeus and 
Herodotus on, 50 sq. 

Ephorus, 162 sqq. ; his history 
rather quasi - national than 
universal, 163 ; rhetorical 
features, 164 ; 167 ; 211 

Epics, the Greek : regarded as 
history by early Greeks, 2 
sqq.; corpus of Trojan epics 
(poets of the epic cycle), 5 ; 
genealogical epics, ib. ; local, 
6 ; geographical, 7 ; influence 
of, 17 

Epidaurus, 87 

Eratosthenes, 168, 189, 252 

Eucrates, 122 

Eudemus, historian, 25 

Eudemus, philosopher, 206 

Euemerus, 21 

Eugammon ("cyclic" poet), 15 

Eugeon (Euagou), 25 note ^, 29 

Eumelus, Corinthiaca, 6, 15 

Euripides, 153, 212, 218 

Europa, legend of, rationalised, 19 

Eusebius, 237 

Exegetai, 183 

Fabius Pictor, Q., 197, 224 
Fiction, history as supplying place 

of, 175 sq., 241 
Flaminius, agrarian law of, 208 
Fortune. See Tyche 
Fourier, Charles, 256 
Frederick the Great, 225 
Freeman, E. A., 52, 126, 159 

Galilei, Galileo dei, 252 
Geffcken, J. , 168, and Bibliography 
Generations, reckoning by, 28 



Gibbon, E., 47, 106; on Herod- 
otus, 67 ; 225 

Goligher, W. A., 156 

Gomperz, Th., 15, 129, 205 

Gorgias, style. 111, 114, 124, 170 ; 
166 

Gracchi, revolutionary movement 
of the, 208 

Greek language in the Roman 
empire, 224 

Grenfell, B. P., and Hunt, W. S., 
57, 99, 155, 156, 158 

Grundy, G. B., 70, 86 

Guicciardini, 248 

Gutschmid, A. von, 25, 26 

Hannibal, 213, 214, 217 

Hecataeus of Miletus, founder of 
history, 11, 15, 17, 34 ; his 
works and travels, 11-18 ; 
rationalism, 13-14 ; influence 
on mythography, 18 - 21 ; 
chronology, 28 ; source of 
Herodotus, 49 sq., 66, 69 ; on 
Egypt, 49 sq., genealogy of, 
50 

Hegesias of Magnesia, 169 sq., 
171 sq. 

Helen, Herodotus on, 47, 52 

Hellanicus of Lesbos, 27 sqq., 88, 
183, 262 

Heracleides, prince of Mylasae, 
24, 25, 69 

Heracleitus, 205 

Heracles, Herodotus on, 46 sq. , 48 

Herder, 240 

Hermocrates, 121, 136 

Herodes Atticus, -wepl iro\LTeias, 
wrongly ascribed to, 181 note 

Herodorus of Heraclea, 20, 21 

Herodotus : 

life, 36 sq. ; travels, 37 ; visit 
to Euxine regions, 41 ; at 
Plataea, 70 ; rewarded by 
Athenians, 65 
work, artistic plan of, 38 sq. ; 
genesis of, 39 sq. ; geograph- 
ical excursus, 40 sq. ; epic 
features, 41 sq. , 87 ; speeches, 
42 sq. ; his theme, 44 ; large- 
ness of his conception, 45 ; 
historical anecdotes, 56 sqq. ; 
chronology, 28, 72 sq. ; un- 
fulfilled promise, 40; Assyrian 
logoi, ib. 



276 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS 



Herodotus — contd. 

debts to Hecataeus, 12, 13, 48, 
49 sqq. ; criticism on Heca- 
taeus, 50 sq. ; sources for 
history of Persian invasion, 
66 sqq. ; influenced by Athen- 
ian drama, 68 ; no traces of 
sophistic influence on, 54, 56 ; 
Ionian stories about Persia, 
54 sqq. ; on Aristeas, 7 ; 
omits incident at Ai-temisium 
recorded by Sosylus, 25 

maxims of historical criticism, 
69 sq. ; errors about Egypt 
and Babylon, 70 sq. ; mis- 
orients Thermopylae, 70 ; in- 
competence in accounts of 
warfare, 72 

anti-Ionian spirit, 61 sqq. ; phil- 
Athenian sentiments, 62 sqq. ; 
on Pericles and Alcmaeonids, 
64 ; treatment of Themis- 
tocles, ib. 

scepticism and rationalism, 46 
sqq. ; credulity and incred- 
ulity, 58 sqq. ; irony, 47 ; 
distinction between age of 
gods and heroic age, 48 ; 
belief in superhuman control 
of events, 68, 124 sq. ; on 
oracles, 129 

on antagonism of Asia and 
Europe, 52 sqq. ', on Egypt, 
60 sq., 70 

alluded to by Thucydides, 103 ; 
canonized, 151 
Hesiod, scheme of successive 

ages, 5, 187 
Hieronymus of Cardia, 177, 190 
Himerius, 170 
Hippias of Elis, 82 
Historia Augusta, 235 
History and historiography : 

origin of word (Ionic la-Topirj), 16 

accuracy, 81, 197, 209 

"ancient" and '^ modern" 
Greek history, 17, 164, 190 ; 
ancient (mythography), 18 
sqq., 33, 46 

antiquarian history, 188 sqq., 
246 sq. 

causes, historical, 93 sq., 200 
sqq. 

civilisation, history of, 45, 103, 
185 sqq., 193, 199 



History and historiography — cont. 

constitutional history, 182 sqq., 
206 sq. 

contemporary history, 12, 18, 
22 sq., 78, 82 sq. 

critical history ; principles of 
criticism in Herodotus, 69 
sqq. ; Thucydides first really 
critical historian, 74 

cyclical theory of history, 205 
sq., 248 

dogma and history, 238 

epics regarded as history, 2 

fiction, history serving as, 175 

Graeco-Roman historiography, 
234 sq. 

individuals, their role in history, 
212 

influence on historiography of : 
Ionian science, 9 sqq., 34; 
Persia, 11, 34 ; Sophists, 75, 
77 ; rhetoric, 161 sqq. , 209 sq., 
228 ; Alexander's conquests, 
175 sq., 177 sq. ; political 
speculation, 179 sqq. ; Peri- 
patetics, 187 sqq.; Stoics, 
204 sqq., 235 sq., 238 

Ionian school of history, 21 
sqq. 

national history, 226 

origin of history in Ionia (at 
Miletus), 11 sqq. 

perspective of history, 254 

philosophy of history, 239 sq. 

political history (founded by 
Thucydides), 78, 150 

pragmatical history, 199, 243 
sqq. 

progress in history, 248, 255 sqq. 

psychology, in historiography, 
107 sq., 147, 154, 213 sq., 233 

realistic history, 173 

relativity, historical, 250 sqq. 

Roman historiography, 224 sqq. 

scientific, Greek historians not, 
147, 258 

speeches : historiographical con- 
ventions as to, 229 sq. ; in 
Herodotus, 42 sq. ; in Thucy- 
dides, 108 sqq. ; in Xenophon, 
152 ; in Ephorus, 164 ; in 
Polybius, 217 sq. ; Cratippus 
on, 157 

summary of development of 
Greek historiography, 240 sq. 



INDEX 



277 



History and historiography — cont. 
universal history : (Herodotus), 
45 ; (Ephorus), 102 sq., 199 ; 
(Polybius), 193, 199; under 
Roman empire, 235 sqq. ; 
Chi-istian construction of, 
237 sqq. 

Holzapfel, L., 84, and Biblio- 
graphy 

Homer, prestige of, 2 ; authority 
of, 238 ; historical back- 
ground, 4 ; archaism, 6 ; geo- 
graphical interest in Odyssey, 
7 ; sceptical spirit in late 
parts of Iliad and Odyssey, 9 ; 
influence on Herodotus, 41 
sqq., 45 ; treatment by Thucy- 
dides, 104 ; Eratosthenes on, 
189, 218 sq. ; geography of, 
218 sq. 

Howard, Albert, 227 

Hunt, W. S. See Grenfell 

Hyginus, 234 

Hyperbolus, 121 sqq. 

Intaphernes, story of wife of, 54 
Ion, memoir writer, 88, 103, 210 
Ionia, sceptical spirit in, 8 ; science 
and philosophy of, 9 ; history 
of, 23 sq. ; Herodotus on, 62 ; 
works of Ionian geographers, 
69 
Isocrates, Evagoras, and influence 
on biography, 153 ; influence 
on history, 161 sqq. ; Pane- 
gyric, 180 note 
Urup, 16 

Jerome, 237 

Josephus, 221 

Justin, epitomizer of Trogus, 236 

Kaerst, J., 178 

Kirchhofi', A., 264, and Biblio- 
graphy 
Kornemann, E., 235 
Korte, A. , 32 note 
Kromayer, 198 
Kullmer, H., 29, and Bibliography 

Laomedon, legend of, rationalised, 

20 
Lehmann-Haupt, C, 30, 68, 71, 

and Bibliography 
Leibniz, 256 



Leo, F., 154, 234, and Biblio- 
graphy 

Libanius, 170 

Livy, 221, 226 sqq., 229 

Logographoi or logopoioi= -prose 
writers, 15-16 ; list of early 
historical, 25 note ^ ', use of 
term by Thucydides, 43 

Longinus, on Herodotus, 42 

Lucian, 149, 151 

Lycophron, poet, 168 

Lygdamis, 36 

Lyons, bronze tablet of (speech of 
Claudius), 229 

Lysicles, 122 

Macan, R. W,, on Herodotus, 7, 
37, 38, 39, 40, 70, and 
Bibliography 

Macedonian conquests, Demetrius 
on, 201 ; fall of Macedonia, 
191, 201 

Macedonian hegemony, 161, 165 

Machiavelli, 142 sqq., 248 

Mahafi'y, J. P., 6, 32, 43, 110, 
223, and Bibliography 

Manning, Cardinal, 238 

Megara, Athenian decrees con- 
cerning, 87 ; embroilment 
with Athens, its connexion 
with Peloponnesian war, 95 
sqq. ; geographical import- 
ance, 100 

Melanthius, 183 

Melesagoras, 26 note 

Melos, conquest by Athens, 138 
sqq. 

Memoirs, historical ; earliest, 176 ; 
178 ; 232 sq. 

Merope, land of, 166 

Meyer, E., 63, 64, 156, 261, 263, 
and Bibliography 

Miletus, centre of Ionian culture, , 
178 

fi[fir)<ns, 172 

Minos, 104 

Mithra, in Herodotus, 71 note 

Mommsen, Th., 220 

Mucianus, 190 

Murray, Gilbert, 4, 9, 21, 145 

Myths, later type of (7th, 6th 
centuries), 9, 56 sq. 
comparative mythology, 48 

Mytilene, revolt against Athens, 
115, 139 



278 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS 



Naupactia, 6 

Nearchus, 176 

Nicias,Thucydideanportraitof,119 

Nicole, J., 180 

Nissea, H., 92, 194, 195, and 

Bibliography 
Nitocris (Nebuchadnezzar), 71 
Norden, E., 170, 171, and Biblio- 

giaphy 

Oecumene, idea of, 178 
Oenobius, decree of, 76 
Olympiads, reckoning by, 168, 194 
07-bi^ terrarum, 178 
Orpheus, treatment of, by Phere- 

cydes, 18 
Otanes, conspiracy of, 65, 56 

Palaephatus, 21 

Pan, son of Penelope^ 48 

Panaetius, 204, 221, 222 

Panyassis, poet, 26, 36 

Pausanias, digression of Thucy- 
dides on, 89 

Peisistratids, digression of Thucy- 
dides on, 89 

PentekontaUeris, the, 105, 262 

Pergamon, 188 

Pericles, expedition to the Pontus, 
41 ; funeral oration in 439 
B. c. , 63 ; Herodotus on, 64 ; 
private life ignored by Thucy- 
dides, 87 ; detached attitude 
of Thucydides towards, 95, 
133 sqq. ; speeches of, in 
Thucydides, 113 sqq. , 133 sqq. ', 
idealism, 115 sq. ; character- 
ized by Thucydides, 120^ 127 ; 
not Xa/uiTrp&s, 128 ; his per- 
sonality not revealed in 
Thucydides, 147 

Peripatetic school, influence on 
history, 187 sqq. ; on Polybius, 
200*97., 246 

Perseus, Herodotus on, 46 

Persia : influence of Persian con- 
quest of Ionia on the rise 
of history, 11, 22, 34, 240 ; 
Ionian stories about, 54 sqq. ; 
Persian war, treatment of, by 
early historians, 22 sqq. ; by 
Herodotus, 66 sqq.; conquest 
of Persia by Alexander, 175 

Peter, H. , 234, and Bibliography 

Phanodemus, 183 note 



Pherecydes (of Leros), mytho- 
grapher, 18-19, 21 

Pherecydes (of Syros), 15 

Philip II. of Macedon, 165 

Philip III. of Macedon, 213, 214 

Philistus, 159 sq., 167 

Philochorus, 183 

Philosophy, influence on history, 
179 sqq., 219. See under Peri- 
patetic school, and Stoicism 

Philosophy of History, 239 sq. 

Fhoronis, (J 

Phylarchus, 173, 209 

Pindar, on custom, 55 ; on forms 
of constitution, 56 ; 218 

Plataea, Herodotus at, 70 ; siege 
of, 85, 86 

Plato, 179 ; Gorgias, 180 ; on 
origins of civilisation, 184 
sqq. ; on cycle of constitu- 
tions, 185, 205 

Plutarch, on Herodotus, 54, 65 ; 
biographies, 154 ; on Cra- 
tippus, 155 ; his Consolation to 
ApoUonius, 200 

Polemon of Ilion, 190 

TToXiTeia, in Athens, c. 411 B.C., 
135 ; Trdrptos, 181 

Political literature, in last part of 
fifth century b.c, 179 sqq. 

Trdkvwpayixoaivr] (antiquarianism), 
188 

Polybius : 

life, 191 sqq. ; travels, 192, 

198 ; at New Carthage, 194 
work, first design of, 192 ; 
second plan, 193 ; additional 
insertions, 193 sq. ; supposed 
symmetry of, 195 sq. ; chrono- 
logy, 194 ; speeches, 217 sq. ; 
narrative power, 217 ; style, 
218 ; Mommsen on, 220 
on requisites of historian, 197 
sq. ; on accuracy, 197 ; de- 
nounces rhetoric, 209, and 
gossip, 210 ; didactic, 211 ; 
on patriotism, 215 ; fair- 
mindedness of, 215, sq. ; on 
Fabius, 197 ; on Aratus, 108 ; 
on Ephorus, 199 ; on Phylar- 
chus, 173, 209 ; on Homer, 
218 sq. 
topography, 198 ; on Lake 
Trasimene, 70 ; on New 
Carthage, 86, 194 



INDEX 



279 



Polvbius — contd. 

pragmatism, 199, 243, 247; 
on causes, 200 sqq. ; ou Tyche, 
200 sqq. ', cyclical theory of 
history, 205 ^9., 248; theory 
of constitutions, 206 sq. ; 
views on religion, 215 ; on 
national character, 212 ; treat- 
ment of individuals, 213 sq. ; 
interest in psychology, 214 
sq. ; Peripatetic influence on, 
200 sqq. ; Stoic influence on, 

204 sqq. 

on Roman institutions, 196, 
207 sq. ; on Gracchan move- 
ment, 208 
comparison with Thucydides, 
209 sqq. 

Polycrates, story of ring of, 58 

Pompeius Trogus^ 236 sq. 

Pompey, 221 

Poseidonius, 221 sqq., 227 

Potidaea, 97 sq. 

Pragmatical, meaning of term in 
Polybius, 199. See under 
History 

Prasek, J. V. , 13, and Bibliography 

Procopius, 148 

Progress, idea of, 199, 255 sqq. 

Trpocpaacs, in Thucydides, 93, 94 

Ptolemy I., Soter, Memoirs of, 
175, 176, 187 

Ptolemy II., Philadelphus, 187 

Publicists : early poetical (e.g. 
Solon), 8 

Purser, L. C, 160 note 

Pylos and Sphacteria, episode of, 
in Thucydides, 85, 86, 126 

Pyrrhus, 168; Memoirs of, 176, 
233 

Pythagoreans, cyclical theory of, 

205 sq. 

Ranke, L. von, 259 

Reinach, S., 58 

Rhetoric, influence on history, 
161, 167; Isocratean, 164, 
169 ; Asianic, 170 sqq. ; Greek 
love of, 174 sq. ; at Rome, 
228, 233 

Rhodes, 221, 222 

Roberts, W. Rhys, 166 

Rome : Roman constitution, 207 
sq. ; decline of Rome, 208 ; 
historiography of, Lect. VII. 



Saint-Simon, Claude H. de, 256 

Sallust, 225 sq., 227, 228, 230, 231 

Samos, Herodotus at, 3(5 ; Duris 
on, 172 

Sanctis, G. de, 156, and Biblio- 
graphy 

Scala, R. von, 200, 201, and 
Bibliography 

Schulz, O. Th., 235 

Schwartz, E., 21, 162, 163, and 
Bibliography 

Scione, 139 

Scipio Aemilianus, 198, 204, 208 

Scipio Africanus, 213, 214 

Scylax of Caryanda, 24 sq., 176 

Seeck, O. , 29, and Bibliography 

Sellasia, battle of, 198 

Semiramis, 71 

Sicily, Antiochus on, 26 ; Thucy- 
dides on early history of, 89 ; 
Athenian expedition to, 126 
sq. ; Timaeus on, 168 

Simonides, 218 

Sitalces, digression of Thucydides 
on, 89 

Socrates, pupils of, 153 

Solon, date of his visit to Ionia, 
57 ; his elegies, 3, 180, 183 

Sophistic movement, 54, 56, 75, 
77, 153 

Sophocles, 110 

Sosylus, historian, 25 

Sparta, Thucydides at, 76 ; reason 
for entering on Peloponnesian 
war, 94 sqq. ; war party at, 
97 ; constitution of, 207 

Stahl, Th., 42, and Bibliography 

Stesicliorus, 8 

Stesimbrotus, 88, 103, 180, 210 

Stoicism, influence on Polybius, 
204 ; on Universal History, 
235 

Strabo, 221 

Suetonius, 230, 231, 234 

Susemihl, H., 195, and Biblio- 
graphy 

Syracuse, 76 

Tacitus, 228 sqq., 254 

Theagenes of Rhegium, 10 note 

Thebes, 171 

Themistocles, treatment of, by 
Herodotus, 64; by Thucy- 
dides, ib., 89, 128 

Theognis, 3, 180 



280 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS 



Theophrastus, 172, 190 

TheopompuSj 165 sqq. ; Oxyrhyn- 
chus, fragment ascribed to, 
by some, 156 ; condemaed by 
Duris, 173 ; 180 

Theramenes, 121, 181 

Thirty Years' Peace (445 b.c), 
instrument of, 85 

Thrace, Thucydides in, 75, 76 ; 
89 

Thrasymachus, 179, 181 

Thucydides : 

life, 75 sqq. ', stages and changes 
in composition of his work, 
79 sqq. (cp. Appendix) ; 
initiates true contemporary 
history, 78 ; founder of poli- 
tical history, ib. ; his work a 
great step in historiograpliy, 
147 
influence of Sophists on, 75, of 

Athenian empire on, 76 sq. 
principle of accuracy, 81 sq. ; 
principle of relevance, 87 sq., 
100 ; omissions, 86 sq. 
digressions, 88 sqq. ; limitations 

of, 146 sq. 
view of the purpose of historio- 
graphy, 81, 242 sq., 258 sq. ; 
renounced popularity, 167 
collection of information, 83 
sqq. ; use of documents, 84 
sq. ; reference to an in- 
scription as written d/j,vdpols 
ypdixiMffiv, 31 ; references to 
Herodotus, 81, 103, 90 ; re- 
ferences to older works, 103 ; 
on Hellanicus, ih., 104 sq. ; 
on ancient piracy, 252 
artistic method, 90 sq.; 
dramatic method, 108, 117 
sqq. ; differences in his style, 
obscurity, etc., 110 sqq. ; 
style influenced by drama,124 
speeches, 99 sq., 108 sqq. ', of 
Pericles, 113, 133 sqq. 
(Epitaphios), 114 sy., 133, 136, 
146 sq. ; of Cleon, 109, 115 
sq. ; of Diodotus, 115, 137 ; 
of Corcyrean envoy, 94 ; of 
Corinthians, 96*7., 116, 117; 
of Alcibiades, 109 ; dialogue 
of Archidamus and Plataeans, 
113 ; Melian dialogue, 111, 
113, 138 sqq. Cp. Appendix 



Thucydides — contd. 

reflexions on civil sedition (in 
connexion with Corcyra), 
113, 145 
treatment of chronology, 73, 105 
sq. ; of economic facts, 91 
sq. ; sketch of early history 
of Greece, 102 sqq. ; of the 
Pentekontaeteris , 104 sq. ; on 
the heroic age, 103 
on the causes of the Pelopon- 
nesian war, 92 sqq. ; use ofahia 
and irp64>a(ns, 93 ; on general 
course of the war and causes 
of collapse of Athens, 124 
sqq. ; on the Athenian 
empire, 135 sqq. ; on Tyche, 
125 ; on oracles, 129 ; cliarged 
with want of patriotism, 131 
sqq. 
on the logic of policy, 138, 140 
sq., 232 ; comparison with 
Machiavelli, 143 sqq. 
topographical mistakes, 86 ; 

errors in text of, ib. 
Book v. , 85, 264 sq. ; Book vm. , 

84, 85 
on Themistocles, 64, 120, 121, 
128 ; view of Pericles, 115, 
116, 121, 127 sq., 132 sqq. ; 
on Cleon, 118, 123 ; on Nicias, 
118 sq. ; on Alcibiades, 120, 
127 sq. ; on Autiphon, 120 
sq. ; on Hermocrates, 121 ; on 
Theramenes, ib. ; on Hyper- 
bolus, 121 sqq. ; comparison 
of Athens and Sparta, 116 
influence of, on historiography, 
148 sq., 150 ; on Philistus, 
159 sq. ; imitators of, 150 ; 
canonized, 151 ; continuations 
of his work, 152, 154 ; com- 
pared with Cratippus, 157 ; 
compared with Polybius, 
200 sqq. 

Tiberius, Emperor, 231 

Timaeus, 167 sqq. ', popularity of, 
172 ; antiquarianism, 188 ; 
studies by Polybius, 193, 194, 
195, 198, 209, 211, 217; 
influence on Sallust, 226 

Trajan, history of Dacian war, 
176 

Trasimene, battle of, 227 

Trogus. See Pompeius Trogus 



INDEX 



281 



Trojan war, origin of, according 
to Acusilaus, 19 ; used as an 
era, 32 ; origin of, in Herod- 
otusj 62 sqq. ; treatment by 
Thucydides, 103 sq. 

Troy, building of walls, according 
to Herodorus, 20 

Turgot, A. R. J., 256 

Tyche, in Thucydides, 125 ; in 
Polybius, 200 sqq. 

Tyrrell, R. Y., 160 note 

Valerius Antias, 225, 227 

Varro, 234 

Velleius Paterculus, 231 

Virgil, 205 

Virtu, 145 

Wachsmuth, C, 37, 165, 225, and 
Bibliography 

Walker, E. M., 157 

Wiedemann, A., 70, and Biblio- 
graphy 

Wilamowitz-MoUendorflF, U. von, 
on Pherecydes, 19 ; on 



Melesagoras, 26 ; on Thucy 
dides, 85, 86, 88, 91, 114 
150 ; on Theopompus, 156 
on political literature, 180 
on Atthidographers, 183, and 
Bibliography 

Wilcken, U., 25 

Wolfflin, J., 103, and Bibliography 

Woodhouse, J., 70 

Wunderer, C, 214, and Biblio- 
graphy 

Xanthus, historian, 26 
Xenomedes, historian, 26 
Xenophaues, his rationalism, 10; 

epic poems, 11, 17 
Xenophon, 151 sqq. ; Anabasis, 

152, 176 ; Helknica, ih. ; 

Agesilaus, 153 ; Memorabilia, 

154 ; as a biographer, 163 sq. ; 

213 ; 230 

Zalmoxis, 61 

Zeno of Rhodes, 198, 216 

Zoilus, 162 



THE END 












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